Lights Will Guide You Home
by mr-stank
Summary: "The courts had decided against arresting him, despite Thaddeus Ross' fevered attempts to land Tony in prison. They had acknowledged that his violation of the Accords had resulted in the apprehension of Helmut Zemo, but he had still broken the law. So his sentence of home confinement was more of a public show of power than anything else." A story following the events of CACW.
1. Chapter 1

**Hi. I'm Iz.**

 **If you're here, it means you're probably a lot like me and you like to lay awake at night and think about Civil War.**

 **I spend an unhealthy amount of time thinking about Tony Stark and how he deserves some happiness in his life. Of course, I can't guarantee that that'll actually happen in this story. So if** ** _that's_** **the reason your here, let me direct you to the door.**

 **I guess I just want everybody to understand that Tony Stark is a treasure, and a hero with a heart of gold.**

 **This isn't necessarily an unhappy home for Steve Rogers and company, although I do harbor a lot of ill feelings towards them. Please, if you want to get something off your chest, tell me how much you love Tony Stark, or just want to talk about anything Tony Stark I do have a Tumblr.**

 **It's the same as the username I'm publishing this story under.**

 **mr-stank**

 **That's me. For all you guys out there looking for a Tony Stark Positivity blog on Tumblr.**

 **Like every author in existence, I really appreciate reviews. Things you like, constructive criticism, etc.**

 **I guess I also have to say that I don't own any of these characters. Unfortunately.**

 **One last thing, I am extremely busy, so I can't guarantee when I'll be able to update. My only hope is that this is a story I'll finish and/or not actually delete...**

 **Alright *rubs hands together* let's get this story started.**

—

 **Chapter One**

House arrest.

The courts had decided against arresting him, despite Thaddeus Ross' fevered attempts to land Tony in prison. While they had acknowledged that his violation of the Accords had resulted in the apprehension of Helmut Zemo, he had still broken the law. So his sentence of home confinement was more of a public show of power than anything else.

At first, Tony had outright laughed at the idea of it. What was house arrest if your house was a tower?

But barely over two weeks into his court mandated probation, Tony was akin to a dangerously over pressurized soda can. Tony felt as though he were existing in a state of constant internal combustion, and every breath he took only added to the anxious tension that had settled in his chest.

He was under constant surveillance, and all methods of communication were either being monitored 24/7 or had been cut off. Of course, he could easily design something to trick their tech. But after brief consideration, Tony had deemed it more trouble than it was worth.

Besides, there was nobody he wanted to contact anyways.

Rhodey was allowed to visit twice a week, and he came faithfully, always eager to distract Tony from the inferno of his own mind.

Pepper came once, and had immediately enveloped him in a hug. He had melted into her arms gratefully. She didn't say anything and neither did he. They didn't have to. They stayed that way for a long time.

Rhodes, Pepper, and Vision were the only ones who knew about what really happened in Siberia.

Tony had told Rhodey fairly quickly, incapable of keeping the story to himself for any longer. He needed somebody to confide in. He needed somebody to know.

The words had come tumbling out of his mouth only a few days after Rhodey was out of the hospital and they were both back at the compound. He explained everything. He showed him the shield, the letter, and the phone.

Rhodey was justifiably furious.

He was the one who had been there with Tony after he learned that his parents never made it to the airport.

He was the one who could only watch as Tony utilized every possible outlet to avoid confronting his grief, falling into a downward spiral that he wouldn't escape until years later.

He was the one who waited through the night when Tony would finally be finished with dozens of meetings with Stark Industries board members and public relations as they tried to keep the general public from knowing that drunk driving was the most probable cause of the crash.

He was the one who watched silently as Tony ripped apart his father's home office, consumed by anger.

He was the one who really knew just how badly the accident had messed with Tony's head.

 _He killed her, Rhodey. My dad. He killed_ my mom.

Except Howard Stark didn't kill Maria. Somebody else did.

Tony told him about his utter lapse of clarity after he watched the video. How he lost all ability to think rationally, because all he was able to see was the Winter Soldier brutalizing his father choking the life out of his mother. All he could understand was that Steve had known and he hadn't told him, and he was choosing his parents' murderer over him.

He told Rhodey that he was too tired to hate Steve for lying to him, and for hurting him.

Rhodey told Tony that he would hate Steve for him.

For being a goddamm hypocrite. For only having enough room in his heart to protect one friend. For leaving Tony in the belly of an abandoned HYDRA base, with only the bitter Siberian wind to hear the breath rattle in his broken and bruised chest.

Pepper knew because of Rhodey, and she had come to see him within hours.

Vision knew because he was the one who received FRIDAY's distress call after she lost contact with Tony. He saw the discarded shield, the curved gash in the suit's chest plate, and the melted and singed remains of Barnes' metallic arm. The android pieced it together.

Tony had been rushed to a Russian hospital. They inflated a collapsed lung, set broken ribs, sterilized the superficial cuts on his face and stitched the deeper ones, prescribed medication for a sever concussion, and gave him another sling for his arm (which he promptly discarded).

His fake sternum and portions of his ribs left the doctors fumbling, but Tony assured them that as long as the hydroxyapatite and polyethylene composite bone implants hadn't been fractured, any micro cracks wouldn't cause a problem.

T'Challa was the one who brought Zemo back to Germany to stand trial. The Wakandan king had stayed long enough to see his father's killer indicted of terrorism and multiple counts of murder before returning to his own country. But he promised Tony that he would keep in touch. The Accords still faced massive amounts of revising in order to produce an ideal version, and T'Challa planned to provide his assistance.

That was a month ago. And nothing new had happened in that time.

Zemo had been moved from a German facility to the Raft.

Steve Rogers and his band of fugitives seemed to have fallen off the face of the planet. Any attempts to locate them had proven unsuccessful.

Of course, Tony knew where they were. It wasn't difficult to figure out. The only other people who had been in Siberia with them were T'Challa and Zemo. There had been no sign of Steve or Barnes after Tony watched them leave, so it wasn't much of stretch for him to conclude that they, and the rest of the team, were hiding in Wakanda.

He wasn't about to start being helpful to Ross and give him a tip, for the same reason he had dragged his feet to assist with the Raft breakout. He wasted so much time getting there, it would've been faster if he had run to the prison with his feet encased in blocks of cement.

Despite the illegality and short-sightedness of their actions, the Avengers were still his teammates. When he had seen them imprisoned in the Raft, a super max that he had helped design, his stomach had twisted.

The Avengers didn't deserve to be there. None of them did.

So he'd let Ross' line blink for two hours.

Which was another reason he was under house arrest.

They didn't trust him not to program his way past their restrictions, so they shut down most of his systems from the outside. He still had power. He could watch the news and communicate with FRIDAY. He even had access to a single interface, albeit a primitive one provided to him by his babysitters.

Tony found their efforts admirable, despite the fact that they were locking him in his tower using the same technology that he had been asked to consult on years ago. If anybody could cheat the system on a computer from the Stone Age, he could. But he didn't bother.

Today was the Monday of his third week of house arrest. Rhodey usually came on Mondays, but he had yet to show.

So Tony sat on the floor with his back pressed against the large bay windows that overlooked the New York skyline. He held a screwdriver in his mouth as his hands worked with two pieces of the toaster he had dissected.

He wanted it to play Punky's Dilemma when it finished toasting his toast. That was his schedule for today. Rip apart a toaster and put it back together so it'll sing.

Maybe tomorrow he'd do the microwave.

Needless to say, Tony was losing his mind.

After another hour or so of mindless tinkering, he was almost finished. Tony was just tightening the screws on the bottom of his toaster when he heard the elevator open and the whir of mechanical joints.

"Tony?"

"Yeah." he called distractedly, focused on the final stage of his project.

"Tony -" Rhodey trailed off. "What are you doing to your toaster?"

Tony slipped the audio chip into a slot in the side of the machine. "I made it better." He set the toaster on the lowest heat level and pressed the toast button. "Watch."

Rhodey approached warily, his eyes flicking between Tony and the toaster. "That thing isn't going to come alive, is it?"

Tony didn't answer and observed his creation from where he placed it on the floor, tapping his finger against his knee impatiently.

 _"Is it?"_ Rhodey pressed seriously. He tapped the toaster with the toe of the shoe. "Because -"

"Shhh!" Tony hissed, doing his best to ignore the sight of Rhodey's braces as he moved his leg to gesture to the toaster. He could walk much easier now, but Tony didn't think he'd ever get used to seeing them. "And don't kick him! He's working."

Rhodey rolled his eyes and took a breath to say something at the exact moment that the toaster finished its imaginary toast.

 _"Shhhhh!"_ Tony waved a hand wildly in his friend's direction, staring at the toaster expectantly. "He's going to do it."

 _"When I was an English muffin, 'bout to make the most out of a toaster, I'd ease myself down -"_

"Should I be concerned that this is what you do when you have nothing to do?"

Tony's head snapped up when he heard the familiar voice. He looked past Rhodey to see Natasha Romanoff standing closer to the elevator, looking at him with a combination of uncertainty and hope.

 _"Comin' up brown, I prefer boysenberry,"_ sang the toaster.

"P.S," Rhodey announced, "I brought Natasha."

Tony stared.

 _"I'm a "Citizens for Boysenberry Jam" fan."_ sang the toaster.

—

They were in his lab now, him and Natasha. He spilled everything to her too.

God, he was going soft.

He tried to make light of it, to broadcast his usual aura of comfort and ease. But he couldn't maintain it when he described the video. His throat got tight and he squeezed his eyes shut. But they betrayed him. The images were branded on the underside of his eyelids, taunting him when he blinked and tormenting him when he slept. Or tried to.

 _My mother please God not her, not my mom_

He told her about the fight. He showed her the letter and the phone, and pointed to the wall panel that concealed a safe which held the shield.

Natasha read the letter, her eyes narrowing as she went further and further down the page, her lips twisting into a scowl of distaste.

"Steve wrote this?" Natasha asked incredulously, flipping the page over to see if there was more writing on the back. There wasn't. Tony had already checked a dozen times.

"I know I can't blame Barnes for what he did, Nat. He was brainwashed. It wasn't his fault. But I can't -" Tony took a bitter pause, clawing for the right words, "I don't think -"

"You don't think you'll ever be able to look at him without seeing the man who killed your parents." Natasha finished for him.

Tony raised his head slowly, silently. Natasha sat next to him on one of the Eames sofas that were arranged in front of the television in his lab. He could feel her steady gaze warming the side of his head.

She cleared her throat, "I understand why you're angry with Steve. I am too. But I don't understand why you aren't angry with me. I was with him when he learned that Barnes killed your parents."

Tony shrugged his shoulders and tilted his head toward her, still steadfastly staring at the opposite wall. "I expect you to have secrets. Just like you know that I have mine. But Steve, he hated when the team kept secrets from him. He expected honesty. So at the very same moment he confronted me about keeping Ultron from the team, he was keeping the truth about my parents from me. He lied, even after I asked him if he knew, he still tried to lie to me."

Natasha nodded, glaring so hard at the letter she held in her hands Tony marveled that it didn't catch fire spontaneously.

"And the Accords still need a lot of work if they're going to be able to accommodate what the world wants and what we want. At least, those of us still here." Tony said in an effort to change the subject. He shook his head in frustration and frowned at the carpet as if it had done something wrong, "And even more work to try and get the others back. If they even want to come back. I'm certainly not going to beg."

Natasha was silent. The only sound was their synchronized breathing and the muffled hum of FRIDAY's many servers from a temperature controlled room, conjoined to the lab.

"I did." she finally murmured. "I wanted to come back."

Tony lifted his gaze to meet Natasha's, stunned by her simplistic honesty. Natasha, who was usually all hard edges and harder corners, was staring back at him with soft eyes and a small smile.

But her smile shone like a million suns to Tony, who had never felt more alone in his whole life than in the past month. Gratitude flowed through him like liquid ambrosia, warming him all the way to his fingertips and lifting some of the invisible weight off his chest.

"And I'd like to stay," Natasha continued, watching him carefully, "if you'll have me."

"You can stay." he exhaled heavily, hoping that she could see how much her desire to stay meant to him. "You'll have to help around the house though. Take out the trash, do the dishes, start the laundry."

 _Everybody needs family._

Tony would just have to rebuild his.

"I think I can manage that. Come here, Stark." Natasha tugged him into a loose hug. It wasn't until he realized against her shoulder that Tony realized that he had been sitting rigid on the couch for some time.

"Are you going to call him?"

"No."

"Okay."

"Okay."

—

 **Natasha:** As far as apologies go, your's was shit.

 **Steve:** Tony?

 **Natasha:** No. He gave me this number. It's Natasha.

 **Steve:** Where's Tony?

 **Natasha:** You should watch the news, Steve.

 **Steve:** Did something happen?

 **Steve:** Natasha?

 **Natasha:** I hope that someday you realize how much he's done for you. For all of us. He deserves much better than what he gets.

—

 **mr-stank :)**


	2. Chapter 2

**Hey, I'm back. Would you look at that? THANK YOU to everybody who gave me feedback on that first chapter. It means a lot as a writer to know that people are actually reading what you write.**

 **I don't own these characters blah blah blah**

 **Alright, let's read.**

* * *

 **Chapter Two**

Within three hours that he received confirmation that his house arrest had officially been terminated, Tony was on a plane, shooting across the expanse of the Atlantic ocean. Destination: Geneva.

He'd put his final weeks of home confinement to good use, filling his solitary days tirelessly developing Natasha's defense for the UN. The instant she had left the tower the day she had come to visit Tony, he had ripped apart his lab, hunting for something to write on.

He had crafted the outline of an argument for Natasha's reinstatement on the first thing he found, which happened to be the backside of a rough sketch that Tony himself had made months ago of an upgrade to Sam's wings. A project which had gone uncompleted. Tony had allowed himself half a second to stare at the design, a million and one thoughts threatening to spill into him, before he flipped it over and began scribbling.

Over the days that had followed, Tony tweaked and sharpened his presentation, FRIDAY providing input here and there, most of which he incorporated. He even used parts of the Accords themselves to produce his most infallible points.

One morning, the newborn sun barely peaking between the skyscrapers as it lifted itself further above the horizon, an agent ventured into his penthouse. He belonged to the lucky band of government operatives that had been on assignment to watch Tony for the month-long duration of his probation.

Tony recognized him by his unkempt suit, rumpled from spending hours on end stuffed into the surveillance van that had been parked stubbornly on the street below for the past month, and his caffeine clouded, yet hawkish eyes, red rimmed and squinting from weeks spent watching a monitor.

He handed over Tony's phone, who swallowed the urge to press his lips to the device, and crisply informed him that all of the tower's systems had been reengaged earlier that morning. He gave him a tight smile, as if his lips were made of rusted iron, and told him that his house arrest was legally over.

Tony was on the phone the moment the elevator doors closed, FRIDAY having already dialed the number for his UN contact.

His secretary answered, her voice accented by the beautiful lilting tones of the French language. She became quickly flustered with his demanding urgency, trying her hardest to remain neutral with a _'the delegates are_ very _busy, Mr. Stark, it may not happen today.'_

However, Tony was in no mood to wait. He'd been sitting on this for two weeks and _'ma'am, you tell them Tony Stark needs a meeting_ today _, I'll wait.'_

It took some doing, but the woman managed to scrape together the United Nations representatives who made up the Avengers' supervising board and arrange a conference in Geneva that evening.

Tony called his pilot, instructed him to fuel a jet for the trip to Switzerland, and notified him that he'd be at the Stark Industries private air strip within the next two hours.

He reluctantly shrugged out of his MIT sweatshirt, worn soft by decades of use, and traded it for a midnight black Westmancott suit ensemble paired with a striking red tie. He ran down to his lab, collecting various papers from where they were strewn across one of his desks and stuffed the most important ones into an interior pocket of his jacket.

Tony snagged the keys to his R8 as he passed the counter on his way to the private elevator in his lab, settling his tinted sunglasses on the bridge of his nose. The elevator doors closed, shutting him inside and he began an smooth descent to his personal garage.

"FRIDAY," Tony spoke distractedly as he swiped through the thousands of emails and texts and voicemails he had missed in the last month, "reboot all systems will you? Run full diagnostics on the firewalls, I don't want any bugs left on my stuff."

"Right away, Boss." came the disembodied voice.

Tony pocketed his phone as the elevator slowed softly to a halt. The doors opened and he stepped into the brightly lit underground garage, weaving his way through various sports cars before stopping at the bright orange Audi. He ducked into it, the door shutting with a soft whoosh of air.

The sound of rubber tires on lacquered cement barely penetrated the dark interior of the car as he peeled through the garage, the large door opening automatically to let morning light stream into the space. He was forced to stop, however, by three agents who had taken up position in the middle of the ramp that led to the streets of Manhattan.

Tony rolled down the window as they approached, and it lowered with gentle hiss of machinery at work within the body of the car.

They were part of the UN mandated security detail that had been hovering around the tower throughout Tony's house arrest. He was, after all, a high value target for many organizations and for a wide range of reasons, so the governing board that had placed him under house arrest had also ordered that a security team be present at all times on the premises. Tony had almost fought it, but with nearly all of the tower's systems having been temporarily disabled, some of his defense protocols had also been out of commission. A security detail wasn't a terrible idea.

"Mr. Stark -" one of them tried to start, but Tony didn't let him get that far.

"Sorry guys." he flashed them his trademark grin, "I gotta run. Places to go. People to see. Messes to clean up. It's been real though. Good work here. Go get a drink or something!" Tony raised his voice as he drove away, leaving them staring after him, waving exhaust from their faces.

He directed the car up the ramp and eventually leveled out, looking into the flowing street outside of the tower. Pedestrians on the sidewalks near him stopped to point at the car. Tony held a peace sign out the still open window, then he plunged into the chaotic world of New York City traffic as easily as a trout into tumultuous rapids.

* * *

He was alone on the jet, aside from the pair of stewardesses who sat apart from him chatting softly and the pilots in the cockpit.

Natasha hadn't come, and he hadn't asked. He knew where she was. Or, at least, what she was doing. Nobody knew her whereabouts, except for Tony and Rhodey, who still weren't entirely sure where _exactly_ she was. Tony wouldn't be surprised if she had left the city.

Natasha was still on the run, and wasn't aiming to get arrested. And being a fugitive in New York City was the definition of impossible, no matter how good you were. Somebody was bound to recognize her somewhere. Tony still considered it a minor miracle that she had even managed to sneak into the tower with Rhodey the day she had come to see him.

She had risked a lot to do that, which demonstrated to Tony that her intentions to realign herself with him were genuine.

Tony reclined in a plush chair next to the window, his feet propped up on the seat opposite. A series of television screens flashed on the wall, a man's voice relaying the developments of the stock exchange so far. The next four screens played national news stations, flicking back and forth between channels as FRIDAY saw fit, filtering through information to provide only that which Tony would be interested in. Another displayed a world broadcasting station, telling stories of war, starvation, and political unrest from across the globe.

The words organized themselves in Tony's mind as he reviewed the notes he had made. Some, he filed away for later. Others, he dumped immediately.

Some made him look up from his work in interest. Like a report on a heated civil war that was in the progress of ravaging through the small African country of Burundi. Warlords had seized shipments of weapons and bombed a village, leaving deep scars of devastation in their wake.

Eight years of anger stirred inside of him, and he scribbled _hospital for Burundi?_ in the corner of the sheet of notes he was currently reading.

The flight was nearly eight hours long, and Tony spent half of it rehearsing his proposal to himself and the other half alternately absorbed in his phone or looking out the window.

The sky was crystalline and the ocean glittered placidly beneath him, thousands of diamonds riding the crests of waves. It stretched on as far as he could see, until the water met with the slight curve of the cloudless horizon.

The feeling of sluicing through the sky, thousands of feet above the earth had always been exhilarating for him. The muffled whine of the jet engines, the overlapping voices that emanated from the multiple flat screens, and the indistinct conversation of the women nearby blurred into a comforting sort of ambience and he settled back to enjoy the remainder of the flight.

But, like always, his mind refused to still itself, and he found thoughts of Steve and his team worming their way into his consciousness. Tony tried to push them back through the cracks, but they flowed like water, unbidden and pervasive.

The head of that great snake of frustration raised itself in his gut, its neck waving menacingly. Poised to strike. Tony remembered Steve's outright refusal to sign the Accords, asserting that _he_ could decide what was best for 117 countries. Frustration hissed threatening, coiling itself tighter inside him. He remembered Captain America, _God's Righteous Man,_ shaking his head when he learned that 117 countries were scared of them.

 _The safest hands are still our own._

The words echoed like a battle drum in Tony's head, pounding relentlessly.

Yet it were _Steve's_ hands that ended everything. _His_ hands, the hands that belonged to a teammate, a friend, _those_ hands had defended a killer. A murderer.

 _Barnes didn't kill them,_ Tony thought, trying desperately to believe it.

 _It doesn't matter,_ hissed the snake. _They're gone,_ she's _gone, and he did it. And Steve_ knew.

Steve's hands were the hands that lifted the shield above his head and brought it down with enough force to rip through metal.

 _oh god he's going to kill me, he's going to kill me_

It were Barnes' hands that had issued the blows that ended his father's life. And it was his hand that wrapped like an iron band around his mother's neck, squeezing until her choked cries died with her.

And it were _Tony's_ hands that had created Ultron. _His_ hands that had nearly single handedly brought something into a world it had almost ended. _His_ hands weren't safe.

Nobody's were.

The snake inside of him struck violently, and Tony shifted in his seat, suddenly aware that his hands were gripping the arms of the chair like they were a life-line, his knuckles bloodless. He unclenched his fingers, spreading them out in the air before him, like he would in his lab as he worked on a project. But he couldn't stop the slight tremor that ran through them, and he tucked them into his elbows as he crossed his arms over his chest.

He stared out over the ocean again and it seemed colder than it had before. The water the color of flint and the diamonds that had been there glinted glacially up at him like shards of broken glass.

The screens continued on, prophesying of death, disaster, and a doomed world.

* * *

Pardoning Natasha wasn't the battle Tony had anticipated.

He had spoken to the room which contained the 12 United Nations representatives, presenting Natasha's case confidently. He referred them to the Accords, which each member had a copy of before them, and pointed out that nowhere in there did it explicitly detail what the course of action should be if any Avenger found themselves confronted by a situation in which they considered to be questionable.

"Natasha Romanoff did what she felt to be the best course of action at the time." Tony explained, 12 sets of contemplative eyes on him. "She believed that Steve Rogers was right when he told us about Zemo's plot to wake up the Winter Soliders in Siberia. A belief that was discovered to be false, yet still led to the apprehension of a criminal. She may have allowed fugitives to escape, but her motives were pure. Nobody believed in Barnes' innocence, so she gave Rogers the chance to prove it."

"This is all based on hindsight, Mr. Stark." the delegate from Ethiopia spoke up, leaning forward. He was called Markos. His teeth flashed blinding white in contrast to the darkness of his skin as he spoke. "While it is true that her actions led to the chain of events that result in the capture of a terrorist, she still broke the laws which she had agreed to abide by."

"So did I." Tony countered, pacing deliberately before them at the front of the room. "Her actions were a violation of the Accords that she signed, but the Accords never specify how to act when a judgement call is required in the field."

"A discrepancy we intend to look further into." the German representative pointed out coolly, her frosty blue eyes tracking his movements.

"That is an idea I'll see to when I return to New York, Ms. Schönfeld." Tony reassured her steadily, unruffled by her gelid personality. "But for now, in this case, consider it. Natasha Romanoff is no more of a criminal than I am, and deserves less of a punishment than I received. I broke the Accords and went to Siberia against direct orders. I gave Steve Rogers enough time to break his team out of the Raft and flee the scene before I finally arrived. She's done a better job of following the Accords than I have."

Another woman with olive toned skin, regarded him with soft, almond shaped eyes. When she addressed him, her voice was saturated with a heavy Eastern European accent. "How are you so sure that Ms. Romanoff would return?"

Tony met her gaze honestly, rooting himself. "She has made contact with me, and expressed desire to be reinstated as an Avenger. An _Accord abiding_ Avenger."

This stirred up a ripple throughout the room, representatives turned to each other and discussed the information quietly and efficiently.

"And you are positive she is truthful?"

"I am."

There was another bout of hushed conversation around the conference table.

When it died, the Head of the Liaison Committee to the Avengers, Alan Sabbe, a wiry Belgian man with perceptive grey eyes, stood. "We find Natasha Romanoff suitable to return to her duty as an Avenger."

Tony stared at the man for a time before the reality of his announcement finally sunk in. He felt the rigid tightness that had been with him throughout the course of the meeting ease away, like dew burnt away by the morning sun.

"However, she is expected to serve a mandatory probationary period of one month. Ms. Romanoff shall not be permitted to join the Avengers on any missions they may be called on during that time, but she will not be confined to the Avengers Compound. Mr. Stark," Sabbe graced him with a small smile, "you've got your teammate back."

Tony held out his hand to shake the Belgian's, his own lips lifting into his own politely satisfied smile, holding back the urge to beam around giddily. "Thank you, sir."

"Perhaps, Mr. Stark," Representative Schönfeld said, her blue eyes landing on him once more, though they held a warmer glow, "you could possibly wait another day before demanding a meeting? It is, after all, the middle of the night here in Geneva."

Tony smirked at her, tilting his head in her direction. "I'll take that under consideration."

The delegates seated at the table passed around a slip of paper, which stated Natasha's pardon and official reprimand, signing their names until twelve signatures sat with glorious finality at the bottom of the page, a seal of victory.

* * *

It was almost three in the morning by the time Tony walked back into his penthouse. The buzz of the city was at its lowest point of the night, but the glow of light and the roar of trains and subways and the bark of taxi horns still filled the black night, a beautiful chorus.

Tony walked further onto the floor, suit jacket draped neatly over one arm. He toed off his designer shoes, discarding them in the middle of the hallway.

He turned the corner past his personal kitchen and had a clear view of the entire wall of glass that overlooked the Manhattan skyline. A few stairs below him, located in the spacious patch of unnecessarily fluffy carpet that Tony had insisted upon having, a certain assassin sat silently on a love seat facing away from him.

He knew that she had heard him come in, but she made no sign of moving or turning her head to acknowledge him.

Tony removed the folded up slip of paper from one of the pockets of his jacket, then arranged it over the back of the nearest bar stool. He glanced at the sheet in his hand, another feeling of triumph washing throughout him, making his fingers tingle.

"Hey." he said softly, not eager to disturb Natasha out of her trance. Call it personal experience. "I brought you something."

Natasha's head swiveled on her shoulders like an owl and she planted her striking gaze on Tony as he approached the common area. The common area where they had all used to gather after difficult missions, sprawled across everything and limbs thrown over each other like the family they had become.

Tony figured maybe that's why Natasha was here. To try to remember the good things about the people they had lost.

He hovered over her, holding his hand out to offer her the document, sympathy making his chest constrict.

She took it and delicately unfolded the paper. The dim lighting provided by a single light in the kitchen and the glow from the city below was enough to read the words on the sheet. Her eyes ate up the words, and Tony watched her quietly.

Natasha got to the bottom, reading every name, her thumb brushing over the letters. "They approved?" she breathed, so softly Tony almost missed it.

"Of course." he said, as if it should never have been a doubt. For either of them. "I can be very persuasive." There was a heartbeat of silence before he shrugged, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his dress pants. "You're back."

Natasha smiled softly at that. But, perhaps it wasn't so much a smile as it was the way her face changed from unnervingly pensive into complete relief. It might as well have been a smile in Tony's eyes.

"Thank you."

Tony might not know everything about Natasha, but he knew more than most. And he knew how much this truly meant to her. For the majority of her life, Natasha had worked outside of the law. Even S.H.I.E.L.D turned out to be Hydra in disguise. What Natasha sought for in her life was the knowledge that she was doing what she did for the right reasons, and that she was working for the right people.

The Avengers had given her that reassurance. They'd given her a moral purpose.

"I would put that up on your wall." Tony stated lightly, gesturing to the UN document in her hands.

Natasha snorted, "I don't have a wall, Stark. I've been on the run for the past two months, remember?"

"You've got a wall, Nat." Tony said softly, the playfulness gone from his voice. He met her eyes as she looked up at him. "Three floors down. There's lots of walls. And they're all your's. Remember?"

It was difficult to see in the half light, but Tony could've sworn that Natasha's eyes actually swam for a moment. Though it could've easily been the wavering light sweeping and shining across them.

Then she blinked once, and it was gone. "You got a frame? Because this is going up."

* * *

 **Steve:** T'challa told us you were pardoned.

 **Natasha:** Tony got me cleared.

 **Steve:** Are you happy?

 **Natasha:** Of course. I'm back on the right track.

 **Natasha:** But I could be happier.

 **Natasha:** He cleared me. He could clear you if he wanted to. You could be reinstated if you signed. You'd have to serve probation, but that's a small price to pay considering.

 **Steve:** Nat, it's not going to happen.

 **Natasha:** Are you happy, Steve?

 **Steve:** _read at 3:15 a.m_

* * *

 **mr-stank :)**


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three - Fixing Things**

Wakanda was the picture of volatile beauty. Its lands were unpredictable and wild, but it was visually stunning from the safety of the king's palace.

In the morning an impenetrable mist hung heavy over the landscape, muffling the sounds of raging rivers and concealing predators from the untrained senses. It seemed an alive thing, seeping into every crevice of rock and weaving around trunks of the massive tropical trees.

By midday, the golden blaze of the African sun would burn through the fog, chasing it away and bringing every shadow into the light. The skies were almost always clear and offered a deep periwinkle blue, tropical birds tracing intricate, swooping patterns into the sky. The jungle was dense and lush. The leaves of the trees were broad and waxy, shading the forest floor so well that the canopy created an umbrella for light, leaving everything beneath the treetops living in permanent shadows.

At night the jungle came alive. The entire country seemed to vibrate with life, every living thing announcing its presence. Most nights, Steve would lie awake in his bed, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of animals living, hunting, surviving, and dying.

The palace was situated at the foot of a steeply faced plateau. The Wakandan stone was a dark shade of grey, lighter than charcoal but duskier than ash. According to T'Challa, the early kings of Wakanda had strategically selected the base of the dark stoned plateau to dissuade outsiders from venturing too close to the heart of the country. The impervious wall of inky rock was intimidating to say the least. It stretch for miles in either direction until it reached the country's borders, and towered hundreds of feet above the palace like a foreboding curtain.

T'Challa had been less than forthcoming to disclose Wakandan secrets, but he had mentioned once that a network of tunnels and passageways, centuries old, had been carved into the belly of the plateau. They were Vibranium mining shafts. Those who worked in the mines had to train for years to commit the labyrinth to memory. There were apparently no maps, just an innate knowledge of the tunnels passed down from generation to generation.

Outside of the palace and its inhabitants, the people lived in small, interconnected villages in close proximity to the plateau. Beyond that was the jungle and the dangers it hid, and nothing else. All Wakandans were warriors. Men, women, and children alike. They had to be in order to survive the treacherous nature of the land.

Although small in size and in number, Wakanda and its people were forces to be reckoned with, hardened and immovable.

They were also highly secretive, which made for the ideal refuge for Steve and his team. Nobody ever came into the country, at least none that made it as far as the palace before either turning back or being killed by some deadly creature of the jungle, or perhaps a Wakandan. Steve didn't ask, he didn't really want to know. The important thing was that nobody from the outside world had the ability to enter Wakanda, unless they had explicit permission from the king.

The people who lived in Wakanda rarely left. Their lives here were stable, and the traditions they lived by had existed for centuries. The Wakandans were a tightly knit band of people who shared relationships as strong as the ties between brothers and sisters. They were tremendously loyal to each other and to their king. They had no reason to leave the country and those who did returned quickly, only going as far as they were needed to escort a shipment of exotic fruits, linens, and other materials unique to Wakanda.

T'Challa had assured Steve that the people looking for them would be hard pressed to actually find them, even with extensive resources. Because whatever the rest of the world could do, Wakanda could do better. The technology in the palace was sleek and efficient, more advanced than most of the S.H.I.E.L.D tech that he had worked with.

But despite Wakanda's electronic advancement, they couldn't compete with Tony Stark. Steve had lived with the man and been the recipient of his tech for years. If Wakanda was cutting edge, then Tony had built himself a personal bridge that extended _beyond_ the edge and into thin air. His funding was practically unlimited and he had a mind like a steel trap, constantly looking to the next thing.

So it wasn't so much the world that Steve worried about finding them, it was Tony Stark. When he brought it up with T'Challa, the man had fixed him under his perceptive gaze, and half smile twitching at his lips, and said, _"Then I suppose you had better pray that he isn't_ _looking for you."_

One part of Steve hoped that Tony wasn't looking. The last thing he wanted was to be drawn back into the same fight that had dumped them in the spot they were now. He didn't want to keep arguing responsibility and accountability and compromise. He didn't want to have to be stuck between his friendship with Tony and their moral disagreements.

The other part of Steve, the part that missed Tony and felt the loss of his friendship with a dull ache, hoped that he _was_ looking for them. He wanted to try to rebuild some of the trust they used to have in each other. He wanted to look into Tony's eyes when he apologized, so he could show him how truly sorry he was for the way everything had happened.

Did you know?

In his heart, Steve knew that things would never go back to the way they had been. And that realization, coupled with the guilt of understanding that it was _his fault,_ filled him with an unquenchable coldness that radiated from his chest throughout his entire body.

He wasn't alone though. He had his team. Not his real team, not exactly the team he _wanted._ But they were there. They had stuck by him through it all, and were surprisingly functional notwithstanding.

They spent much of their excessive free time gathered together in one of T'Challa's graciously given lounge rooms on an upper floor of the palace. The space was large and furnished minimalistically. The entire exterior wall was glass, which overlooked a crystalline river that gurgled around craggy rock outcroppings. Only a few hundred yards from the palace walls the tropical trees abruptly began growing closer together, their branches tangling and vines snaking between their trunks. Between the palace and the jungle, a tall grass field rippled as the occasional breeze swept through.

It was picturesque, and Steve enjoyed drawing the landscape or the young Wakandan children as they chased each other through the wild grass that was sometimes taller than they were. Most days, he sat with a sketchpad in his lap on a low-seated leather chair close to the windows, soaking up the heat as the sun's warmth penetrated the glass.

Clint, Wanda, Scott, and Sam grew close over the weeks they had spent together confined to the palace. They kept each other entertained enough that the memories and the regret and the frustration were kept somewhat at bay.

Clint would challenge them to a game darts. Disciplinary actions needed to be taken when the game evolved to a dangerous level of aggressive competition and Scott had needed to be treated by the palace's medical staff. After that, darts players were only allowed to stand in one position and throw only at the dart board.

Watching them made Steve smile before it reminded him of the time that Tony had developed a special darts program when they were all living in the Tower between missions to tear down HYRDA.

Tony had threatened them all with bodily harm if he found one more hole in his walls. When he unavoidably discovered a hole approximately the size of Thor's hammer the next day, he had simply removed it from the wall and dropped it from the upper balcony of the common floor. Clint had been devastated and searched the entire Tower for something to glue the broken pieces of the unnecessarily expensive dart board back together.

Two hours later, and only after Tony had finished being disappointed in Clint's belief that he would actually have glue in his house -

 _"Glue? Do I look like somebody who'd own glue? What, do you think I just slap some Elmer's onto your arrows and hope it all works out? What I actually use is a variety of chemical adhesives, which requires a highly involved process of stimulating reactions between monomers and curing the resin with radiation to produce polymers with the correct thermoplastic properties. My God, Barton. This is why I'm in charge of making things. If it was up to you we'd be flying in a jet held together by paperclips."_

\- he showed him how to work the new virtual darts program he had just developed.

When darts started to lose some of its excitement after about three hours, Scott would start up a card game. Steve would join in for a few rounds before he got tired of losing. His time in prison had taught Scott how to bluff all too well, Clint was a spy so his poker face was infallible, and Wanda could read minds. Sam would last a little longer than Steve, but then he too would toss his cards in, declaring them all cheaters.

 _"Tony, stop cheating!"_

 _"I'm not."_

 _"Counting cards is a legitimate form of cheating."_

 _"It just happens! I can't help that my brain keeps track of the cards. It's completely reflexive. Get over it. Besides, it's not like any of you need the money. You all live with me!"_

A lot of the time, they would sit on the couch in front of the flat TV screen that dominated one of the side walls, watching the world as it spun on without them. After some uncomfortable, tension filled moments at the very beginning, usually started by Scott saying something caustic about Starks and dirty industrialists and thieving bastards, they all tried to stay away from anything Tony Stark related.

It was hard.

And then Natasha had texted Steve. The first time his phone vibrated, Steve's hand had immediately shot out and grasped it. He always kept it within reach. Just in case. Everyday he would will it to ring, needing to apologize, needing to hear Tony's voice.

But he had stared at the first text, the words frozen on his screen, suddenly nauseous with an noxious combination of apprehension and regret.

In the end, it had actually been Natasha texting him. She hadn't been particularly friendly, but she hadn't been hostile either. She had told him to watch the news, so Steve had waited until later that night after his team had ventured off to their respective rooms.

He had watched various new channels, clutching the phone, praying that something hadn't happened.

House arrest certainly wasn't the worst thing that could've happened, but it didn't help assuage Steve's guilt. He fought the guilt down, warding it back with the anger he yielded as a torch.

It was Tony's choice to sign the Accords. It was Tony's choice to go to Siberia without a UN sanction. He knew the risks. He should be lucky that house arrest was what he got, not a cell in a prison in the middle of the Atlantic.

Steve knew he was being unreasonable, trying to justify things he had no right justifying so he could make himself feel better, and he ended up just feeling worse. Tony had come to Siberia to _help._ He had come as a friend, with genuine intentions. And he had been hurt. And he was probably still hurting, alone in a tower that was too big for one person.

So Steve worried relentlessly, watching the news alone at night. He listened to debates between government officials as they outlined in detail the pros and cons of the Accords, and why oversight was necessary. He listened to people call him and his team criminals. And he listened to some say the same things about Tony.

He saw the day Tony was released from house arrest and immediately flew across the world to meet with the official United Nations liaison council to the Avengers. Or what was left of them. Because Steve and his group weren't Avengers anymore. Not to the world.

He watched as Natasha was formally reinstated on national television, once again signing her name on the Accords. She stood next to Tony as their picture was taken, who wore a pair of familiar tinted sunglasses and that trademark smirk that could pass off as a smile if you weren't looking hard enough. Steve didn't know anybody else who could do that like Tony could, and watching them on the screen made him smile to himself.

The more Steve watched, however, the more he could see the internal pain Tony was in. Maybe he could see it just because he _knew_ that something was wrong. Nobody, not even Tony, could feel as much hurt and betrayal as Steve had made him feel and be able to bounce back and be okay.

Some of the spark was gone from his eyes and some of the bravado was gone from his movements. He was still Tony, fueled by the same fire and armed with the same wit, but he stiffened more than he relaxed and he frowned more than he smirked.

But most of all, he just looked _tired_. Like he had fought the entire world, and the world had won.

 _Are you happy, Steve?_

 **XxX**

"Let's go see Laura."

"What?"

"Laura."

"Who?"

"Stark."

"How? I mean, what? What is it?"

Tony dragged his eyes away from the vortex of papers that was fanned across the sleek metal desk he stood at to discover Natasha standing near the entrance of his lab, her arms crossed over her chest. She eyed him with something that resembled a cross between exasperation and fondness.

"Tony."

"Yes."

"Laura Barton. I want to go see her."

"Oh."

Natasha strolled closer to him, the heels of her leather boots clicking softly against the cold floor of the lab. "What are you working on?"

"I'm uh -" Tony shook his head. Natasha had interrupted a very complex idea and he struggled to pull his thoughts together.

"He's fixing the Accords." a voice offered. Rhodey sat in the lounge area, a book tented across his thigh. He swiveled his upper body so he could face them over the back of the modern sofa, throwing an arm over the top.

Tony squinted at his friend, trying to recall when exactly he last remembered Rhodey being in the lab with him. His thoughts were like a cluster of helium balloons that had been tugged out of his grasp when Natasha began speaking to him, and he was now trying to grasp at the trailing strings to keep them from drifting away.

Rhodey glanced up nonchalantly, fixing Tony under his piercing gaze. "And he hasn't spoken a coherent thought for the past," he shook back the sleeve of his sweatshirt to read his bulky wristwatch, "five hours."

 _"Five hours?"_ Tony puzzled over the information, whispering under his breath.

Natasha furrowed her brow, looking all around her, "These are the Accords?"

Tony followed her roving gaze and saw hundreds of papers ordered into sections across a large portion of the floor of his workspace. A cannibalized cover of the Accords had been tossed into the corner, all the pages gutted from its binding. There were notes on many of the documents that littered the floor, highlighted words and phrases, circles and arrows.

In short, it looked like a comprehensive government charter had thrown up its contents onto the floor of his lab, and Tony had in turn thrown up his brain onto those pages.

"I got carried away, I guess." he muttered, looking around him as if he didn't quite remember doing all of this.

Natasha arched an expertly shaped eyebrow at him.

"Don't give me that look. The Accords are far from perfect, they need work." Tony defended himself, placing the highlighter he was holding in his hand on the surface of the desk. It rolled away from him, falling to the ground. He glared at it.

"The boss is actually doing a stand up job." FRIDAY's voice floated from above their heads. "Considering he has no background as a legal advisor."

"See?" Tony crowed, pointing to the ceiling.

"Oh yeah, I'm seeing." Natasha agreed dryly, opening her arms to gesture to the disaster that used to be his lab. "If you're supposed to be keeping an eye on him to make sure he didn't drive over an intellectual cliff, you need to do a better job." she accused Rhodey, who was pushing himself to his feet stiffly.

"Fine." Tony sat down hard in his roller chair, skittering backwards a few feet before letting the sole of his shoes drag on the floor "And you want to go visit Barton's family?"

"He's been gone for almost two months." Natasha explained, looking subtly pleased that she had been able to extract Tony from the depths of his project with relative ease. "Laura would've seen everything that happened. It was all over the news. And it still is. Clint won't contact her, he wouldn't risk it. So -"

"So you want to go tell her what happened. And you want it to come from _you."_ Tony finished for her, sitting forward with his elbows resting on his knees and his head propped up in cupped palms.

Natasha folder her arms in front of her, settling her weight on her heels. "She deserves to know what happened. The truth of what happened. And she deserves to hear it from me, not from a reporter who has nothing more than the words 'criminal' or 'fugitive' to describe her husband."

Tony glanced up at her.

 _You gotta watch your back with this guy. There's a chance he's going to break it!_

Tony dared a sideways glance over at Rhodey, who was bent over at the hip, massaging stiff muscles through gaps in the braces he wore. A stiffness that he knew was there, but couldn't feel. The hinges hissed as the pistons shifted to support some of his weight when he straightened cautiously.

Rhodey, unaware of Tony's watching, let his gaze linger bitterly on the contraption that he relied on to walk. Then he sniffed once, determination forcing its way onto his face, and he took some wavering steps away from the couch. But each footstep landed heavily, like felled trees, telling a story of dreadful perseverance and careful optimism.

A thin sheeting of metal hardened over his heart. "But that's what he is, Natasha. That's what they all are. Fugitives."

Natasha's eyes flared, her body seemed to expand to fill the space around her. Then she deflated, staring at the ground, conflicted. "I know." she admitted quietly. "But she needs to hear it from somebody she can trust."

They stared at each other for a while. Tony struggled to keep bitterness in check. Clint's very deliberate, very unforgivable jab at him using Rhodey's injury during the battle that occurred at Leipzig was still fresh in Tony's mind. A festering, open wound.

But Natasha was right. Of course she was.

"FRIDAY, prep the Quinjet. Natasha and I are going to pay the Bartons a visit. Be sure to activate the stealth systems." Tony announced, feeling the metal casing that had folded up around his heart buckle in places when Natasha's face relaxed in relief. "Let's go."

Natasha led the way out of the lab and Tony made to follow her, but Rhodey's hand gripping his elbow held him back.

"Do you trust her?" he asked seriously, his dark eyes zeroed in on the back of Natasha's head as she trotted down the stairs. "I'm glad she's back, Tony. Believe me. I'm the one who brought her here. We _need_ her. But that doesn't change the fact that we all parted ways in rocky territory a couple months ago."

Rhodey's eyes left Natasha's back when she disappeared from view and he met Tony's own. "It's important to me that you surround yourself with people that won't let you down." he confessed, true concern permeating the air between them.

Tony patted Rhodey's hand on his elbow in an effort to lighten the mood, but his chest ached with pains that traced a suspiciously familiar, curved arc across his torso.

"I trust her enough, Rhodey. And I know she wants to do better. So do I. That's why we signed. And it's why she came back."

 **XxX**

He and Natasha disembarked the private helicopter, the blades sluicing slowly above them as FRIDAY powered down the engine. They stood in the same clearing that Clint had landed the Quinjet in just over a year before. When Ultron happened.

Tony remembered them all shuffling out of the stifling silence of the jet, the heavy despondence emanating mercilessly from everyone. He remembered being the last one to follow them into the small field, looking at all of them, his teammates who were battered and tired. He remembered the way they stared at the wildflowers, the trees, the dust that kicked up when one of them scuffed a boot or fiddled aimlessly with a strap or buckle on their suit. Virtually anything to keep from looking at _him_. He remembered wanting nothing more than to just stay in the jet, so he wouldn't have to be reminded that all of this was his fault.

He remembered wanting to give everything he had to tell Steve what the witch had shown him. He wanted to explain himself, and he wanted to confide in his team the reason he had created the thing that had ripped them apart. He wanted them to know that he had been trying to stop something worse from happening in the future. But he had restrained himself, because they wouldn't understand.

 _When you can do the things that I can do, but you don't, and_ then _the bad things happen… they happen because of you_

And that was the thing Steve would never understand. He didn't understand then, and he didn't understand now.

Ultron had been designed to be preventative measures. That's what the Accords were. Something necessary to ensure that something worse never had the opportunity to happen.

Natasha seemed to rouse herself from of her own lamentations beside him, and started down a well worn trail. Tony set off behind her, two walls of prairie grasses on either side of him.

The farmhouse was exactly how Tony remembered it. Modest, well-kept, and quiet. The paint was fading and weather worn and the shingles were tired, but it added to the rustic charm of the place.

His eyes trailed to a pyramid of lumber and a lone tree stump with the blade of a single bit axe buried in the wood. He saw him and Steve standing there, splitting wood and trying to feel productive as they hid with Clint's secret family.

 _Sometimes my teammates don't tell me things_

Tony swallowed a bellicose snarl that clawed its way up his throat. He turned away from the memory and trotted up the uneven stairs of the home's front porch, the wood creaking softly underneath their weight.

Natasha let herself in and Tony suddenly found himself frozen on the threshold, gripping the screen door with his hand and staring into the house with an overwhelming feeling of dread. Laura Barton had no reason to welcome him into her home. He was associated with the reason her husband was now a fugitive. Perhaps in her eyes, he _was_ the reason she was left to raise three children without a partner.

Natasha beckoned him into the house, her gaze even and understanding. He forced his legs into motion and let the door go behind him. It met the wooden frame with a bang and a head popped up from below the arm of the living room couch.

"Auntie Nat!"

Lila Barton bounced off the couch, her book surrendered to the floor, and skipped, pigtails flying, into Natasha's arms from where she crouched to the girl's level.

Cooper Barton came barreling from around a corner, drawn by his sister's announcement of the arrival of his faux aunt. Lila untangled herself and backed away just in time for Cooper to launch himself at Natasha with all the unrestrained energy of a 12 year old boy.

With her aunt distracted, Tony became Lila's new focus and she stared up at him with her wide, owl eyes. Tony shifted uncertainly and tried to ignore the fact that she kept her gaze trained precisely on him, but he kept glancing back at her as she observed him silently.

He'd never really figured out how to act around children, not that he'd had a lot of practice. There was way too much going on in their heads, and their train of thought was constantly jumping tracks as they switched from one subject to the next with no apparent or volunteered conjunction between the two ideas.

Maybe that's how everybody else saw him.

"I think I know you." she decided with finality.

"Uh, yeah. I was here a year ago when -" Natasha elbowed him in the shin and Tony snapped his mouth shut around the words that were forming on his lips. He looked down at the young girl with liquid brown eyes and concluded that his audience wasn't exactly age appropriate for that story. "Right. I'm Tony."

"You're one of my daddy's friends!"

Natasha managed to remove herself from the grasp of her nephew who had been hugging her with all of his appendages, both pairs of arms and legs wrapped fiercely around her torso.

Distracted by thought of octopi, Tony struggled to process Lila's statement. He could feel Natasha's eyes on him as he worked his jaw. A bitter smile jerked at the corners of his lips, and he managed to smooth it into an honest one. Sometimes friends fought, but it didn't always mean that they stopped being friends.

Tony wondered if that could be true with Clint. He hoped it could. He had always valued his friendship.

"Yeah." he agreed, "Yeah, he's my friend."

Lila grinned at him and crushed his leg in a hug. Tony stiffened automatically, his hands coming up from his sides and hovering without any notion of how to behave. He ended up patting her awkwardly on the head, looking sideways at Natasha who was watching the exchanged with a bemused expression gracing her features.

Upstairs, a baby started to cry and footsteps fell slowly on the stairs. Laura Barton appeared, her attention focused solely on her upset son. She bobbed him gently in her arms, and made soft hushing noises in a loving mother's attempt to both soothe and quiet the child.

When she got to the bottom of the stairs, she finally seemed to notice the new additions in her house standing with her other children. "Nat? Mr. Stark? What are you doing here?"

The woman looked well enough, but she was obviously spread thin. Her length of thick brown hair was pulled into a loose bun, strands falling into her face. Her eyes were shadowed by dark bags and she held herself wearily. She didn't even flinch when the baby turned his head to howl in her ear.

Natasha rushed to her and gently extracted Nathaniel Barton from his mother's arms. She turned her face down to the baby, smiled warmly and cooed, "Why hello, baby boy! It's your Auntie Nat. I came to visit you."

Tony stared at this new, foreign version of Natasha Romanoff.

Natasha raised her head from Nathaniel to look at Laura, holding the baby to her shoulder so he was facing Tony over her back. His little face was contorted in distress and fat tears fell in a continuous stream down his chubby cheeks. Tony tilted his head at him, marveling that any mother had ever been able to raise a child without going certifiably insane.

"How are you doing, Laura?" Natasha asked over Nathaniel's cries.

Laura took a breath to speak, but swallowed tightly instead. Her nose crinkled as tears filled her eyes and she crossed an arm over her stomach bracingly, shoulders hunching forward. She covered her mouth with her other hand as the tears began to fall.

"Natasha, what are you - oh, God."

Without preamble, Natasha had spun around and pressed the still screaming baby into Tony's arms. Once she was sure that Tony wouldn't drop the child, she turned back to her friend, gripping her upper arms, and tugged her into a comforting hug. They vanished down the hall and into the adjoining room and Tony was left with three children.

Nathaniel wailed with ferocity and Tony stared at the tiny human being he held awkwardly in his arms. He released a drawn out, breathy groan and pulled his bearings about him.

"Okay, okay. Hey. Hey, hey, hey. Kid. You don't know me and I don't know you and I've never held a baby before, but let's just give this a chance. Alright? Dammit, Natasha, don't leave me here." Tony spoke the words fervently, but whirled around when he remembered the two other children in the room. His brain-to-mouth filter was practically nonexistent. "Sorry."

"What's wrong with our mom?" Cooper asked inquisitively, peering around Tony to where Natasha and Laura had disappeared.

"Life." Tony muttered, shifting the baby in his arms with minuscule and controlled movements until he was in a more comfortable, less precarious position. "Your aunt's here to make her feel better."

His answer didn't seem to satisfy the boy because his face became even more pinched with concern, but Lila immediately forgot about her weeping mother and perked up. "You want to see my toys?" she asked.

"Uh, sure."

Lila grinned a toothy smile that was short one tooth, and pounded up the stairs. Tony followed more slowly, trying to bounce Nathaniel the same way he had seen Laura do before. It didn't seem to have the same affect.

Cooper stuck to Tony's heels as he followed him up the steps, "And then my room, Tony?"

Tony nodded distractedly, and began reciting the Laws of Thermodynamics to the baby who was still shrieking against his chest. By the time he got around to explaining the entropy of a system, Nathaniel had gone completely silent, and was staring up at him with dry eyes.

 **XxX**

Two hours later, both Lila and Cooper had taken to calling him "Uncle Tony". Something which made him feel like a trespasser into something reserved for especially for Natasha, but simultaneously warmed him more than he would ever admit.

Lila was a budding artist, and she had proudly shown Tony every piece of paper she had drawn or painted on. After an hour of sitting next to her as she described each individual work of art, it gradually became less of a chore to compliment her art.

Needless to say, Tony enjoyed Cooper's room a great deal more. Model airplanes dangled from his ceiling with fishing wire. Legos were strewn haphazardly across his entire floor, creating a minefield of dangerous plastic horrors eager to bite Tony's feet. His creations demonstrated a great deal of potential as an engineer.

Cooper plopped down on his bed, springs squeaking under the weight as Tony joined him, carefully levering himself down to keep from jostling the baby at his shoulder. Next to him, Cooper shifted restlessly, "Tony?"

"Yeah kid?"

"I, um, there's a model. I got it a couple months ago. Dad promised that he'd help me build it, but he hasn't been home for a while. I was wondering - " he trailed off, squeezing his hands into fists in his lap and sighing quietly with disappointment.

Tony felt a bolt of anger sear through him as he watched Cooper Barton struggle to control the longing for his father, and felt Nathaniel's tiny chest rise and fall against his shoulder as he breathed, and remembered the stack of beautiful drawings that Lila kept on her nightstand, thinking every night that he'd walk into her room so she could show him. Clint made a serious mistake leaving these kids, and maybe he didn't deserve another chance, but this family sure as hell deserved a father.

"Hey," Tony said, bumping Cooper with his elbow. "You just happen to be sitting next to the World's Best Model Builder. Show me what you got."

Cooper grinned at him and jumped off the bed to kneel on the carpet, flattening his chest to the ground so he could reach underneath his bed. He pulled out a partially opened model set and placed it on the quilt next to Tony, "So the instructions say - "

Before he could get to far, Tony plucked the thin paper manual out of Cooper's hands and tossed it over his head. "Ignore the instructions."

Cooper frowned at him, "But don't we need them?"

"Sure, you can use them if you want," Tony shrugged, "But nobody who built something that changed the world ever used instructions. You can change the world, Cooper, and you don't need somebody to tell you how to do that. A model is a puzzle, so let's figure it out."

Looking into his eyes, Tony saw the exact moment when Cooper finally understood who Iron Man was. And it wasn't disappointment, the realization that Iron Man was just some guy who'd figured out how to build a suit of high tech armor, but genuine awe and excitement. Because now, doing something amazing like saving the world wasn't as unattainable an idea for Cooper as it had been before, because he saw you didn't need to have superpowers to do it. You didn't have to have incredible gifts to do incredible things.

 **XxX**

By the time they ventured downstairs again, Laura was sipping on a cup of tea and Natasha was moving around in the kitchen.

"Mom! Uncle Tony helped me finish that model dad said he'd help me build. And he said that next time, he'd bring me a new one." Cooper declared excitedly, jumping onto the couch to sit next to his mother.

"He did? Well, that's very nice of him." Laura reached out and ran her fingers through her son's golden brown locks, but her eyes were on Tony. "Now, go get some dinner. Auntie Nat made you guys some Mac 'n Cheese."

Cooper and Lila cheered, dashing into the kitchen, and sat themselves at the counter. Natasha slid steaming bowls of cheesy noodles in front of them, smiling softly.

"Thank you."

Tony lifted his gaze to Laura in surprise. He had been wholly anticipating her anger and blame, that he was left fumbling with her unexpected gratitude.

"You're not -"

"Angry?" she finished for him, placing her mug of tea on the side table. "I was. I thought that you had been the one to throw my husband into prison. But the more I watched the news, the more I realized that Clint did that to himself. He did that to _us._ Not you."

"I explained the details to her." Natasha said as she sat next to Laura on the couch. She looked at the sleeping baby in his arms and the corner of her mouth quirked. "He fell asleep? That means he likes you."

"And you cook. Apparently."

"I added some noodles to boiling water and then stirred in a packet of powdered cheese, some milk, and butter." Natasha corrected him, sitting back further in the cushions and pulling her feet up close to her. "That's not cooking. Anyways, Clint Barton is a grown ass man who made a conscious decision to go help Steve become a fugitive. You aren't the one to blame for that."

"Is there a way to get him back?" Laura asked cautiously, like it was a question she wasn't sure if she wanted the answer to yet.

"It would be a lot of work, but I think I'd be able to at least give him the choice." Tony assured her.

Nathaniel squirmed against his chest sleepily and he began pacing the room. Apparently motion was soothing to baby humans. He didn't get far before he kicked a metal pail. The tin rattled loudly and Nathaniel blinked awake. Tony held his breath, but the baby remained quiet.

"I'm sorry." Laura got up from the couch and picked up the pail. "It rained last night and there's a leak in the roof. I forgot to move it this morning. Clint was going to fix it."

She went around the back of the couch and set the bucket on the kitchen counter by the sink. When she came back she stopped at Tony's side and looked down at the baby in his arms. "He really does like you." she mused, gracing him with a genuine smile. "I'll take him now."

Tony passed Nathaniel off to Laura and straightened his stiff arms. "You said Clint was going to fix it. Your roof's been leaking for over a month?"

Laura hummed distractedly, "Yeah. He left before he got the chance to start."

 _You got a wife, kids. I don't understand, why didn't you think of them before you broke the law?_

"I'll fix it." Tony spoke the words before he even realized he was thinking it. "That's what I do. I fix things."

 **XxX**

 **Natasha:** Tell Clint that his family's doing well. They miss him. His kids asked when he'd be back.

 **Steve:** It was a mistake to bring him into this.

 **Natasha:** We all made mistakes. But at least Tony's trying to fix his.


	4. Chapter 4

**I received a review on my last chapter and I feel like I should issue a warning...**

 **I aM A MemBER OF ThE TonY STArK DefENSe SqUAD**

 **So yes, I will be partial. Despite that, I feel like I try my best to write both Tony and Steve as characters who made mistakes. They both screwed up, but it is my personal opinion that Steve just happened to make a lot more, colossally huge, mistakes. So, there. If that's going to bother you, or somehow insult your character, I apologize, but this probably isn't the story for you.**

 **Thank you for all those that have commented on and followed the story. Even if you comment to say "hey you don't suck" or "please keep writing" or even a smiley face or something, I appreciate it. It doesn't have to be profound to be valuable.**

 **Chapter Four**

He couldn't escape the nightmares.

No matter what he did, he could never outrun them.

During the day, they lurked behind him at a distance, flickering shadows with ghostly faces like old friends.

Demons.

He put his guard up, this self-constructed fortress built out of the simple, burning need to fight. But they were always there, on the outside, chipping and carving at the wall that separated him from them, wearing it down.

They never touched him during the day, always stalking or waiting, but he could feel them. He didn't have to look to know that they were there.

At night, after they'd spent all day whittling down his wall to a cracked shell, the demons' spectral bodies would whisper through the fissures. And their familiar faces presented themselves in painful clarity, dredging up dark memories.

After Afghanistan, one of the faces was Yinsen. Those nights, he dreamed of captivity and pain and desperation and bitter loss.

One of the demons looked like Pepper, and he had nightmares of when she slipped through his fingers, falling into the hungry flames below. In his dreams, he saw her die, and he saw himself unable to stop it.

Sometimes he saw Charles Spencer. And the demon would snarl in his face, reminding him of his own failures and personal responsibility in others' deaths.

When he saw his parents' faces, he relived the last furious words he'd shared with his father before they died. _Killed._

He wrestled with those demons more frequently than ever before, drowning in guilt because he had never expressed his love when he could.

But tonight's demon was Obadiah Stane.

His face hovered above Tony's nose, leering down at him with eyes that held nothing but loathing and ice.

He couldn't move and he couldn't look away, forced to stare into the face of the man who he had grown up loving as an uncle and had trusted like a brother.

The same man who paid to have him killed, used him for his inventions and his mind, and left him to die as shrapnel tore its way to his heart.

The soft blue light of his old arc reactor shone upward onto Obadiah's face, casting sharp shadows over his features. The contours of his face were distorted and twisted into something ugly and cruel.

Obadiah sneered at him, those hateful eyes never leaving his own as he reached to his chest.

Tony wanted to kick and spit and claw, but his body refused to cooperate with his mind, just as it had that night all those years ago. His nerves burned with electric fire, and lead coursed through his veins, deadening his muscles.

All he could do was watch, with wide frozen eyes, as one large hand covered the arc reactor, smothering the light that let Tony knew that his heart was still beating.

And he ripped it out with a reptilian smile.

Tony's breath turned solid in his throat, and he tried to choke in air around it. He watched as Obadiah rose higher above him, holding the reactor in his hand like a trophy.

As he moved, his face rippled and the shadows shifted until Tony was staring up at Steve Rogers.

He was on his back, his entire body screaming where he had been bruised or broken under his armor. Blood, hot and desperate, poured out of his nose and from a deep laceration on his temple.

Steve was over him, his knees on either side of Tony as he lifted his shield above his head, his own face bloody and battered and hardened in blind rage.

In this moment, Steve was vulnerable, his head and chest exposed as both arms were raised above him. It would be easy, so easy, to fire his repulsers into his face.

But it was a hollow observation, and Tony spent only a split second to process it before the idea before banishing it.

He would never do that.

Steve could drown him in betrayal, he could hold him underneath those frigid black waters until his lungs filled with ice and his eyes burned and his heart squeezed and his mind choked on frost, but nothing would ever be enough to take that shot.

Instead, he tracked the shield with burning eyes, noticed the angle at which Steve gripped it in his hands, and his mind raced, scrabbling to understand what was happening. _How_ this was happening.

Tony reacted instantly and he crossed his arms in front of his face, every fiber and nerve in his body responding to primal self-preservation instincts.

 _oh god, he's going to kill me, he's going to kill me_

But the shield didn't come down on his head, or his neck.

It didn't come down anywhere, because Tony jerked awake in his bed, covered in a sheet of cold sweat.

His eyes snapped open, his breathing haggard and he found himself staring at the dark ceiling.

Not Obadiah.

Not Steve.

One of his hands was splayed across the center of his chest protectively and Tony could feel his heart thrumming against his ribcage beneath the knotted mass of scar tissue that spread across the width of his chest.

He left his hand over his heart, its frantic race reassuring him that it was _there._

He lifted his other hand to his face and laid it across his forehead, ignoring the slight tremor that ran through his fingers.

Tony stared into the dark and spent a minute restoring himself to respiratory equilibrium. He breathed through his nose, his hand steadily rising and falling at a more even rate on his chest.

"FRIDAY," he spoke to the ceiling.

The calm voice of his AI slipped easily through the room, "It is currently 2:10, Boss. You've been asleep for just under three hours."

"That's not bad."

"Well, considering the 20 minutes you got last night," FRIDAY reminded him somewhat dryly, "I'd say you've made improvement."

Tony couldn't help the small smile that twitched at his lips when she spoke, but he didn't respond.

The worst of the nightmare and the accompanying frenetic emotions ebbed away, but the memory of them lingered. Like the aftertaste of a bitter pill.

The good thing about a nightmare, was that you would always wake up in a better reality.

But Tony was rarely that lucky.

Most of his dreams weren't elaborate spinoffs authored by his brain and its annoying appetite for his past traumatizing experiences.

His dreams were _real._

They were as if his memories had been filmed, and he was just watching the footage over and over again. Like he was stuck replaying different parts of the same romcom-horror hybrid movie that had gone straight from theaters to immediate DVD release.

He didn't need his imagination to figure out how the nightmare ended, because he'd already lived it.

But he continued to _re_ live it every night. The pain, the emotions. All fresh and renewed like reopened wounds.

He remembered the pure, unadulterated fear and certainty that Steve, his quondam teammate, was gearing up for the killing blow.

He remembered watching the sparks leap and die from the gash in his suit as Steve buried the shield into the metal of his chest plate, splitting the arc reactor straight through the middle.

In a way, that was even worse.

When Steve had broken the arc reactor instead of his neck, Tony hadn't felt a single ounce of relief.

He'd just felt hollow.

Ignoring all the emotional and mental anguish and fury that had driven Tony to attack in the first place, ignoring _that,_ the fact that Steve had specifically targeted the arc reactor was another betrayal all on its own.

Obadiah had known how vitally important the arc reactor was to him. And he had used it against him, flipping that information against Tony and using it to try and get him out of the way.

Steve had known how the suit worked. He had been Tony's teammate, his friend, of course he'd known. For backup purposes, in case Tony needed help in the field.

And more simply, Tony had trusted him enough, even after Obadiah, to know.

And he'd broken it.

To Tony, that was just as much a betrayal as everything that had happened before.

And he knew, Tony _knew,_ that reacting violently had been wrong. He'd regretted it the moment he was able to think clearly again.

He understood that Steve had been trying to protect his friend from him.

But he honestly didn't give a single, solitary fuck.

Steve had done what Obadiah had done. Maybe not in the same context or with the same intent, but Tony had trusted him with the knowledge of something personal and important, and he'd used it against him.

Tony sat up in his bed and kicked the tangled sheets off his legs. FRIDAY automatically turned the lights on in his room at the lowest setting and he walked past the large bay windows that overlooked Manhattan.

He padded through the living area of his penthouse, passing through the kitchen to pick up a steaming mug of black coffee that FRIDAY had taken the liberty to brew for him after he'd woken up.

Every morning (or night, whatever friday) he woke up more exhausted than when he had gone to bed. He spent all day fending off the demons, with their obscured faces and hooked claws, only to be at their mercy when he slept.

The next morning, he would put himself back together, brick by brick, and do it all over again.

But today felt different than the other days.

Most of the time, the nightmares left him empty and angry. Two emotions that produced a useless combination.

He took his private elevator to the floor that had been the Avengers communal suite, and trotted up the stairs to his personal lab. As he swept through the automatic glass door, the lights came alive and his bots whirred in renewed life.

Today was different.

Today, he was angry, but he had a purpose.

Anger was a difficult emotion to control; it was dangerous. Too much of it was blind rage. Too little of it was worthless.

But being angry with a purpose provided motivation. It could be the fuel that ushered progress.

Tony stood in the center of the lab, strolling past the steel table that was entirely covered with his partial revision of the Accords, and clapped his hands together.

"FRIDAY, copy my designs of the Mark 46 onto a blank platform," he said.

"Mark 47?" came the swift reply.

"Smart girl." Tony said by way of confirmation. Butterfingers whirred at him from where he sat a few yards away, tilting his claw. "No, not _you_."

The life size, holographic schematic of the suit formed in front of him. He hadn't looked at the real thing since he got back from Siberia. He hadn't repaired the damage, not sure if he even wanted to.

The arc reactor had always been Tony's main point of vulnerability. It had been when Obadiah stole it out of his chest as it had been when Steve had destroyed it.

The fight had ended in Siberia when the arc reactor lost its power. As the main power source for the suit, all the other systems had just shut down.

The Mark 46 already had other mini arc reactors in other places. The shoulders, three on each side of the torso, the knees, and the top of the calves. The reactors supported various functions of the suit, acting solely as secondary batteries, each on connected to the central reactor.

If the main arc reactor went dead, the others would follow, and the suit would become nothing more than an absurdly heavy fashion statement.

But if each of the miniature reactors were independently powered, they would be able to sustain most of the suit's systems even if the central power source were to become inoperative.

Tony held his hands up to the right shoulder of the suit and spread them apart, the hologram enlarging as he went.

"Are Pepper and Happy still in town?" Tony asked.

FRIDAY's reply was immediate, "They'll be at the Stark Industries offices in Manhattan for the better part of this week."

"Fantastic," Tony said, scrunching his nose and the intricate circuitry of the suit underneath the metal plates. It would take hours to rewire the thing to transform the single reactor into a self-supporting power source. "Send Happy to the Spiderling's place when the sun finally rises. Tell him to bring the kid back here, I want to take him by the compound later today."

"On it, Boss."

"Oh! And FRIDAY," Tony started, his hands hovering above the virtual schematic as he looked up briefly from his work, "tell him to be discreet about it. That word might not be in his vocabulary, this is _Happy Hogan,_ so send him the dictionary definition if you have to."

And Tony sunk into his work, encapsulated by the challenge of the project and the comfortable surroundings and sounds of his lab.

The demons kept well back as he played with the design of his suit, calculating the most efficient and optimal routes for the circuits and placement of resistors and capacitors and the like.

He experimented with the idea of biological circuit fabrication, and using genetically engineered metal affinity bacteria to form microscopic circuits within the suit. The primary results were promising.

The technology was more advanced and progressive than any of his suits before this, and his mind buzzed as he molded the future with confident hands.

He only noticed the mid-morning light illuminating the vast space of the open floor of the tower and streaming into his lab when FRIDAY alerted him of an incoming call.

"Incoming call from King T'Challa."

Tony performed a flicking motion with his fingers and the enlarged diagram of a circuit array blinked and began a virtual test to determine the utility of the power and control engineering.

"Put him through," he said.

There was silence for a beat, and then the Wakandan's richly accented voice filled the room. "Mr. Stark."

Tony spun away from the hologram and strolled leisurely across his lab, "Your highness. How can I help you?"

"I have some information I think you would appreciate that I share," T'Challa said.

Tony stared at the ceiling. He knew that Steve and his team were taking refuge in Wakanda, but he didn't think that T'Challa knew that he knew. After two months of secrecy, Tony would be surprised if the Wakandan king had decided to surrender that information now.

It had to be something else.

"Just shoot me an email. I'll take a look."

On the other end of the line, T'Challa hesitated briefly. "This information is sensitive, Mr. Stark. I would prefer to discuss it with you in person."

Tony fell backwards into one of his roller chairs, supporting his head with one hand and massaging his temple with a finger.

His interaction with T'Challa had been brief and superficial. Natasha had been the one to fold him into their ranks and during the cleanup period of the mess that had been Zemo, Siberia, and the Raft breakout, they had only spoken a few times. Always about the Accords or the mandatory UN hearings, never about themselves.

Newly fatherless and as the king of an exceptionally secretive country, T'Challa seemed distant. Never cold or disinterested, but distinctly separated.

He hadn't given any indication that he had any notion of where Steve Rogers and the others were, and if Tony hadn't already had a fairly definitive theory he would've suspected nothing.

So there was a general mistrust of the young king in that regard. While technically they were on the same side and lobbying for the same things, there were still secrets.

Big secrets.

"Happy Hogan on the line, Boss." FRIDAY interrupted his thinking.

"Hate to cut this short, but maybe you don't mind. I've heard cats don't have very long attention spans anyways. I'll be at the compound in New York later today. Stop by."

Tony hung up abruptly, cutting off anything T'Challa might've wanted to stay before he could draw in a breath to speak.

He leaned over the arm of his chair and stretched desperately for his fifth cup of coffee that he'd set at some point on a workbench, his fingers spidering themselves across the surface as he strained to reach the stainless steel mug. "Put Happy through."

There was a soft click and Happy's voice was suddenly raining fire from ceiling. "When were you going to tell me that you have a goddamn _kid?!"_

"My God, did you even _glance_ at the dictionary reference?"

 **xXx**

Every night, Steve had the same dream.

The one where he lost Tony.

When he slept, he went back to Siberia, to that forgotten bunker with a dreadful past and dark secrets.

He watched the footage of the Winter Soldier as he murdered Howard and Maria Stark, ending a legacy and destroying a family.

 _Tony's_ family.

Tony, who had never spoken an ill word against his father to Steve because he had known how important the memory of a youthful and eager and warm Howard was to him, though Steve knew that Tony hadn't known the same man.

Tony, who had never complained overtly about his childhood other than brief, honest statements which left no room for discussion but also held no blame.

Tony, who had willingly opened his home and freely given his resources to Steve and the team, who labored and advocated and bruised and bled for them, all because he thought they were worth it.

Tony, who had trusted them. Had trusted _him_.

Tony, who had stood stoically between the man who killed his parents and the man who lied about it and watched the tape without a word.

He had seen his parents assassinated, heard his father beg for his mother's life and his mother cry his father's name.

He had heard the brutal sound of a metal fist smashing into Howard's face, crushing and final. And the sound of Maria's staggering and panicked last breaths as the life was choked out of her, terrified and alone.

Tony, who had closed his eyes against the images, sick, but had opened them again because he'd needed to see it. As if he owed it to himself and to them.

Tony, who, after everything, had turned to him, eyes so full of pain, and whispered a desperate question. Because it _mattered to him_ whether or not Steve had known.

 _"Did you know?"_

 _"I didn't know it was him."_

Steve could still taste the panicked lie that had stung like bile at the back of his throat.

Tony had seen right through it. He had always been able to do that.

 _"Don't bull_ shit _me, Rogers. Did. You._ Know?"

 _"…Yes."_

And Tony had jerked away from him like he'd been burned, regarding him like he was a complete stranger, and Steve could do nothing but watch as whatever friendship he'd once shared with him was shattered.

He could've pinpointed the exact moment when he knew that he had lost Tony forever, the instant something deep and irreplaceable just crumbled/snapped.

He had seen it in his eyes.

The way they had emptied completely of every sliver of hope that maybe, _maybe_ Steve hadn't lied about something this monumentally important. Leaving behind unrefined betrayal, disappointment, and something terribly broken.

But the worst part, the thing that shook him the most, was the look in Tony's eyes at the end. When Steve had him on his back and ripped the faceplate of the suit off to expose the bloody mess of his face.

And Tony had been looking at him, eyes dilated with uncomprehending fear as he'd thrown his arms up to protect himself.

Then Steve had realized, and the idea made his stomach clench and his chest ache, breaking through the haze of fury that had turned him into a ruthless machine.

 _He thinks I'm going to kill him._

When the shield had cleaved into the arc reactor, there was no flicker of relief, not a single trace, on Tony's face and he stared at it with wide eyes.

Steve had rested on top of it for a moment, gasping hard for breath, all the rage gone out of him.

Their eyes had met one final time, and there was just pain. Tony had tried to shrink away from him, looking for all the world like his entire life had just disintegrated into ashes before his eyes.

Then he looked away, his gaze sliding to a spot somewhere below Steve's face. There was nothing in Tony's eyes, no anger or agony. They were just empty. Desolate wastelands that had focused on a place far away; a place that Steve couldn't reach.

 _I did this. I did this to him._

Every night, this is what Steve dreamed. When the nightmare had run its course, squeezing every last ounce of guilt and regret from his soul, he would wake up and grope blindly for the phone. And he would grasp it like a lifeline, clutching it to his chest, and fight the heat in his eyes.

 _I did this._

 **XxX**

Today was different. The atmosphere in the lounge room was quiet, but felt charged with electricity. Everybody was waiting for something, but nobody knew what it was.

Steve, Sam, and Clint sat together on the couch in silence

Clint picked idly at a piece of fuzz on the cushion, his brow furrowed in thought and a distant look in his eyes.

Sam reclined in the pillows, watching reports on the increasingly destructive civil unrest in the neighboring country of Burundi, soaking in the news with a depressed sort of interest. He was thinking what Steve was, wishing that they could help, but knowing that it wasn't that easy any more.

Steve had his sketchpad. Instead of drawing the same window of Wakandan landscape for the hundredth time, he projected memories onto the paper. Stark Tower, the version before the Battle of New York, was steadily taking shape, proud and ambitious and hopeful.

The phone rested against thigh, refusing to ring.

Behind the couch at one of the black wood tables in the room, Scott and Wanda were engaged in a subdued game of Scrabble.

They had been playing each other at least three times every day since T'Challa had found a set somewhere inside the palace. The game had worn its excitement down to the very last fiber, and both players seemed to only be participating at this point out of some unspoken duty.

Steve looked up as a shadow moved in the corner of his eye and saw T'Challa enter their little haven.

The man, though not large in stature, could fill a room simply by being in it. He commanded respect with the regal air of a natural-born king and his presence drew attention.

Tony could do that.

"T'Challa." Steve greeted, standing out of courtesy.

The Wakandan king nodded at him, holding what looked like photographs in his hands. "Captain Rogers. I was wondering if I could have a word."

"Of course," Steve said.

"You are aware of the situation in Burundi?" T'Challa asked.

Sam answered for him, gesturing to the TV screen with the remote, one arm folded across his chest, "It's on the news right now. Civil war. The whole place is going to hell."

T'Challa looked vaguely amused by Sam's colloquial bluntness, "Yes, well I met with the Burundian ambassador earlier this morning, and he expressed his very sincere desire to keep his country from falling into anarchy. But I needed to ask something of you, Captain."

T'Challa extended the photos in Steve's direction, his dark eyes cautiously imploring. Curious, Steve took the images and inspected them.

The photos were of weapons. A lot of them. Steve flipped through the images, noting with a cold feeling the collection of missiles, mortars, and cases of guns and ammunition. All with an unmistakably familiar name painted on the sides.

 _Stark Industries_

"These are-" Steve began heavily, gears grinding in his stomach like they ached to be used, but had rusted over.

"Yes." T'Challa agreed, watching him with an unreadable expression.

"What?" Clint, tired of being excluded from the conversation, snatched the photographs from Steve loose fingers.

Recognition flickered across his face, but he said nothing and passed them to Sam. Wanda and Scott had abandoned their Scrabble game and were leaning on the back of the couch to peer over his shoulder.

Wanda visibly tensed and an aura of red flared around her fingers, weaving mesmerizing loops in an orbit of her palm. In the kitchen area, a glass cup exploded in a shower of crystals.

T'Challa glanced wearily to the shards that littered the stone floor at the base of the sink, "I am aware how many of you feel about Mr. Stark, but I do not share your sentiments. Though I have not spent much time with him, I feel that he has a good heart, though sometimes misunderstood."

"When he kills your family," Wanda volleyed back venomously, her eyes sparking, "you can tell us all about _misunderstanding."_

"Wanda," Steve cautions her.

T'Challa leveled a look of severe honesty directly into her burning gaze, "My family is already dead."

Wanda seemed to quail at his words and she turned away, her hair forming a curtain around her face.

Steve wanted to break something.

He felt claustrophobic. He was trapped between loyalty to his team and what remained of his loyalty to Tony.

Even if it was one sided, Steve still considered Tony his friend, and he would defend him when he could and lessen the accusations against him when he couldn't.

He sat down woodenly, the tension palpable in the air, silence hanging between them like a volatile gas waiting to ignite. "What was the question you wanted to ask me, Your Highness?"

T'Challa had reclaimed the photos and he tucked them neatly into the interior pocket of his suit jacket. "If I tell him, will he react in any way that may damage the already stretched relationship between the Avengers and the United Nations?"

What he meant was, _Will he react like he did in Siberia?_

That was the real question, filtered and appropriately phrased for the other company in the room. They didn't know what had happened there.

He didn't know how to tell them. Steve told himself that it wasn't his story to share, but in moments of honesty, he realized that he was just scared.

"Telling him now will be better than letting him find out on his own. If you give him time to process it, he'll be less likely to do something to violate the Accords."

 _Don't make the same mistake I did,_ Steve had told him. And based on the barely perceptible nod T'Challa sent his way, he had understood the message.

"The Accords?" Scott said incredulously. "Those are still a thing? They didn't, I don't know, spontaneously incinerate when Stark broke them to go to Siberia? He seems to be the exception to every rule."

"Tony Stark is as subject to the Accords as all of us," T'Challa said evenly.

"Oh," Scott crossed his arms over his chest, rocking back on his heels as a demonstration of dry curiosity, "so he ended up in an underwater prison too? Or did I just never hear anything about that. Seems like it would've been all over the news."

"We don't watch the news when he's on it," Clint muttered.

Scott glared, "That's not very helpful, Barton."

T'Challa straightened to his full height and he gathered all of them under his gaze, looking at all of them individually as if to ensure he had their undivided attention. "Mistake were made. We are all responsible for some of them, so there can be no room for pettiness. The Accords are imperfect, but I still believe in them. Sheltering you has not changed my position on the matter. In fact, after everything that has happened, my belief in their necessity has only been strengthened."

Grazing over them with his intense stare one final time, T'Challa turned to leave.

"What are you going to do?" Steve asked his retreating back.

"I have already spoken to Mr. Stark. I will be leaving for New York within the hour to meet with him and inform him of this particular development in Burundi."

"What can we do?" Sam asked, leaning forward, his fingers drumming on his knees with impatient anticipation.

That stopped T'Challa and he faced the group from where he stood by the door, his eyes clearly broadcasting a warning and a promise. "You may do whatever you wish. But you would do well to remember that you are in my home, under my protection. If you should choose to leave, know that you will not be allowed back into my country. As king, my first responsibility will always be to my people, and I will never do anything to jeopardize their security. To protect my people, I will not defend you when you are caught. Because if you leave these walls, they will find you."

With his grave admonition ringing in their ears, he swept out of the room, leaving with them the tension still infecting the air.

 **XxX**

 **Steve:** I need to talk to Tony.

 **Natasha:** I don't think that's your decision to make.

 **Steve:** Natasha, please. It's important.

 **Natasha:** He's busy, Steve.

 **Steve:** Fine. Tell him that T'Challa found Stark Tech in Burundi.

 **Natasha:** Tony's stuff? What kind of tech?

 **Steve:** The pre-Afghanistan kind.

 **Natasha:** Shit, that's bad. He'll want to take care of that himself.

 **Steve:** Will the Accords even let him do anything about it?

 **Natasha:** Are you trying to turn this into an argument?

 **Steve:** Stand down. I'm worried. I know how much these kind of things mean to him.

 **Natasha:** You have no idea how much. He doesn't trust anybody else to destroy his weapons except for him. He'll figure something out.

 **Natasha:** Thank you, Steve.

 **XxX**

 **mr-stank :)**


	5. Chapter 5

**This site needs to get its shit together.**

 **The formatting on every chapter I've posted never turns out the way it's supposed to. Nothing gets bolded and I feel like my brain is unraveling.**

 **SOO, for those of you who are as pissed off by this as I am, I have also been updating and posting chapters to this same story on Archive of Our Own. Same name, same username, but much. better. formatting. my. lord.**

 **find me on tumblr mr-stank**

 **Chapter Five**

Tony watched through the glass walls of the conference room as Pepper finalized a merger with the CEO of Sollux Tech.

Last year, Sollux had been breaking new ground in the biomedical engineering industry. The tech that had come out of their labs had been uniquely innovative and Tony had started to track the company's progress with increasing interest.

But corruption had brought the firm to its knees, greed and depravity winding itself so tightly into the infrastructure of the business that it had suffocated from the inside.

Recognizing the opportunity to acquire valuable assets, and also understandably sympathetic, Pepper had enthusiastically opened negotiations with Sollux Tech.

This deal had been months in the making.

In order to save Sollux from bankruptcy, Stark Industries would be integrating the company while retaining all of the clean employees.

The CEO, Liam Maxwell, would be stepping into a high level position within the administrative division of Stark's growing Biomedical Engineering department.

The majority of the Sollux engineers would be fully employed in the same department, with the remainder of employees taking up capacities in various branches of Stark Industries. Some would be entering into the R&D territory, some would be folded into marketing, others would be joining product distribution or design.

Tony felt a hot rush of pride as he watched Pepper sign her name next to Maxwell's on the official contract.

While Stark had always been a flourishing enterprise, it was becoming a modern day behemoth under Pepper's reign as CEO.

Though not a technological genius, Pepper was brilliant in her own right.

Years of running the company from behind the scenes as Tony's P.A had lent her extensive insider knowledge of the inner workings of Stark Industries.

As a mechanic, Tony had always seen the company as a massive, churning machine. All the pieces fit together if you knew where they went, and the system only functioned properly if each component was consummately maintained.

Pepper treated it more like an organism. She envisioned this living, breathing thing that responded to more than just pressures and forces and mechanics.

To her, Stark Industries was an intensely complex entity, which needed to be treated with as much attentiveness and care as a child. She listened when it cried, and responded to it accordingly.

The company had thrived under Tony, but it was _living_ under Pepper. Tony's way had been a science, but Pepper's way was an art.

When they worked as an administrative partnership, they perfected each other's flaws and strengthened each other's weaknesses.

Tony had taught Pepper the importance of doing what felt right even if it seemed to the world that it was wrong, and Pepper had humanized Tony.

That had been the case for more ways than just the management of the company.

Sometimes Tony wondered if she was as miserable without him as he was without her.

On the other side of the glass, Pepper handed off the sleek pen to the Stark Industries head legal advisor who stood at her shoulder and smiled brightly at Maxwell. They shook hands with an air of comfortable finality between them, and then it was over and she was gracefully extracting herself from the congregation of lawyers and board members.

Pepper slipped out the glass door, smiling kindly when she saw him. "Tony. Hi."

"Hey." Tony greeted pleasantly. "Sollux deal finally wrapped up?"

Pepper heaved a relieved sigh and slipped a stray paper deeper into her leather bound portfolio. "Thankfully. Sorting out the legal issues was a nightmare from start to finish, but Liam's incredibly grateful. We gave him and all the Sollux employees a second chance."

"You did good, Pep." Tony said, looking past her and into the conference room where Liam Maxwell was making rounds around the long table shaking hands and thanking every living soul in sight. "Nice guy?"

Pepper glanced over her shoulder and chuckled softly, "Eager. He'll need a project." She looked back at him and tilted her head knowingly, "And I imagine you've already got something in mind?"

"Actually," Tony began, launching into an enthusiastic description of the potential in cybernetics.

Tony explained how Rhodey's braces had helped him go from completely immobile to walking without assistance within the space of a few months. There were flaws that needed to be corrected and systems to be perfected, but the data so far from various tests was compelling.

They strolled next to each other as they made their way to the executive offices, Pepper listening patiently as he spewed technical jargon and numbers, nodding in interest and stopping him without hesitation to ask a question when she needed clarification.

After he was done outlining the engineering behind Rhodey's prosthetics, they engaged each other in a conversation about further developments, improvements, future product trials and distribution.

They volleyed project proposals and objectives back and forth, building off of each other until they had constructed an entire world that they shared together in their minds.

A world where people could walk when they were told that it was impossible, or experience physicals sensations that had been lost to them, or regain the functionality of limbs that had been rendered useless or just _gone_ as the result of a biological defect or some terrible accident.

A good world. One that helped people when they needed it.

Tony's hands itched to be in his lab, to discover and innovate and coax this imagined world to life.

He tried not to think about his BARF system and its theoretical capacity to undo neurologic coding. He tried not to think about advanced cybernetic prosthetics, and of a very particular assassin who probably needed a new one.

Because if he thought of that, he realized how truly remarkable and beautiful a world like that would be for everybody except him.

 _This isn't going to change what happened._

Bucky Barnes could get his arm back. He could even get his mind back.

But Tony could never get his parents back.

 _He killed my mom._

His thoughts came grinding to a halt, the elation of writing out the future in his mind blowing out of him with a gust of bitter wind which carried the sounds of groaning metal and shattering glass.

Tony fell silent, the shadows of his demons flickering around corners, letting him know that they were still there. And that they always would be.

"Tony?"

He looked up at Pepper, and there must've been something empty in his eyes because she stopped walking just outside her office and was staring earnestly into his face, desperately searching him for something that she could fix.

"Are you okay? And I don't want any of your excuses or jokes, because they might fool the people writing the articles or behind the cameras. You might be able to smile at the whole world and they'll believe it because you're _you,_ but you've never fooled me."

Tony swallowed, a familiar hole opening up in his chest. The Pepper-shaped hole. He looked back at her, meeting her sapphire eyes filled with careful love and concern.

"I'll get there." he said honestly. And he told himself that it was true. He knew it was true. It had to be.

"You'll get there?" Pepper repeated.

"Yeah."

Pepper smiled sadly at him, her delicate hands tightening around the leather binder that she clutched to her chest, like she was keeping herself from reaching for his hand.

The silence hung between them like a curtain which neither could determine if they wanted to be the first to open. There was no awkward tension, just the notable, aching feeling that something was missing.

"Okay, Tony." she said finally, releasing one hand from the binder to reach for the silver rod on the polished wooden door of her office.

Little indents from the pads of Pepper's fingers were left in the soft leather after she removed her hand, a testament to the strength with which she'd been gripping the binder. Tony watched them fade.

Pepper opened the heavy door to reveal the interior of her office.

Happy Hogan was waiting in the middle of the room with his arms crossed over his chest, sneaking furtive glances over at Peter Parker, who was seated on a pristine white futon couch, looking very much like a kid who'd been called to the principal's office without any idea why.

Tony was the first to speak.

"Peter, what did you do?"

The kid's head shot up and his face broke into relief, "Nothing! I swear, Mr. Stark, I didn't do -"

"I need a second opinion." Happy announced, with a pointed look directed at Tony.

Pepper moved cautiously into the office, looking between Peter and Happy and then Happy and Tony and finally Tony and Peter. She deposited her binder onto the surface of the desk before addressing the room. "What's going on?"

"Is he," Happy started, jabbing a finger a Peter, who hunched further into himself, and then pointed vigorously at Tony, " _his?"_

Pepper, bless her, took it in stride. She leaned against her desk, fixing Peter under her stare before turning her gaze onto Tony. "He's not his son." she said surely. "Look at him, Happy, he's too tall to be Tony's."

Peter made a sound like he was choking and when Tony tilted his head to shoot a withering glare straight into the kid's soul, he half heartedly broke off into a bout of very undignified coughing.

"First of all," Tony said, affronted, looking at Pepper, who looked much too visibly pleased with herself, "I resent that. Secondly, Hogan, why the hell is it an _opinion_ when I told you an hour ago that he isn't my kid?"

"Do you know, for a fact, that there are no accidental Stark spawn about his age running around out there?" Happy asked, accusing.

Tony considered this briefly. "Fine."

"So, Peter, what are you doing here?" Pepper asked warmly.

"Uh," Peter sat forward, rubbing his hands together nervously. Tony could practically see him formulating a lie and it was painful to watch such a hopeless effort. "I was here for the um, the scholarsh - yeah, the scholarship."

"Oh, right the scholarship." Pepper nodded, smiling knowingly. "Which one?"

"The," Peter trailed off, hanging onto the word and drawing it out as long as possible. He shot a panicked look at Tony who merely shrugged back at him. "February Foundation one?"

"September." Pepper corrected.

"Right." Peter nodded so fast Tony thought his head would fly off his shoulders. "That."

Pepper hummed and regarded him with keen eyes. Peter tightened his jaw under the scrutiny and snapped his fingers, trying as hard as possible to look like he wasn't completely uncomfortable, but failing spectacularly.

"You're the new one, aren't you?" she decided.

Peter started, "The new one of what?"

"Of _them._ The Avengers."

"No!"

"Tony," Pepper admonished him wearily, "you recruited a high schooler?"

"No!" Peter exclaimed again, eyes wide.

"He was doing it by himself, Pep." Tony told her. "I gave him direction, and somebody he knew that he could trust. The most dangerous thing in the world is having nobody to trust."

It was a heavy statement and left an equally heavy silence in its wake.

Pepper met his eyes. She wore a mournful look on her face, like she could see that there was something unreachable inside of him that was torn and frayed and sparking weakly at the ends as it died.

 **XxX**

It didn't take very long to convince Peter that Happy and Pepper were the best people on the planet to keep his secret.

If anybody could understand the public and personal repercussions of announcing to the world that you were a superhero, and Peter's disinclination to do so, it would be those two.

Plus, Pepper had a very reassuring smile.

They were both quick to pledge their silence and support, though Happy gradually grew more and more wary of Peter the longer they occupied the same room.

The man took suspicion too unprecedented level, and Tony had more than once offered a friendly suggestion that he seek professional help.

Happy had tracked Peter with unwavering eyes as Tony had shooed him from Pepper's office, sizing him up and performing threat analyses in his head.

When Peter had been out of sight, Tony had clapped Happy on the shoulder as he passed him, "Don't let him trigger an unhealthy level of paranoia, you have too much of that already."

"But he can," Happy had said very slowly as if he were unsure, "…climb _walls._ It's not _natural."_

"Hey, if he can see that he creeps you out, he'll use it against you. He's a kid, kids do things like that." Tony had said.

Internally, he had been amused that an awkward, high school kid could inspire so much perturbation in a guy who was built like a hammer and was as tough as an ox.

Happy was simultaneously apprehensive of and completely unimpressed by Peter Parker, and Tony knew that the relationship had the potential to be a source of pure entertainment in the future.

But for now, it was just Tony and Peter in the self-piloted helicopter as they circled above the compound.

Peter was leaning in his seat with his forehead pressed up against the window as they performed one last pass over the east wing of the sprawling structure. His knee bounced with barely controlled excitement.

"Deep breaths, kid." Tony said, reclining leisurely across his cushioned bench, replying with boredom to various emails from notable investors and board members.

"I know, I know. Sorry, Mr. Stark." Peter said clasping his hands in his lap to keep them from dancing, "I'm just kind of - oh my God is that an interactive obstacle course?"

Tony arched an eyebrow at the cluster of old Stark Industries warehouses some distance from the complex, "Dude, those are storage units."

"Oh, cool." And the poor kid sounded like he genuinely meant it.

The helicopter directed itself onto the landing pad and Peter flung himself out the door the instant the landing skids settled on the cement.

Great gusts of wind generated by the still churning rotors overhead buffeted against them, and Tony's jacket whipped around him as he followed Peter out more slowly.

They walked side by side down the short strip of concrete pathway into the shadow of the main building. The biometric scanner kicked into life as they approached the side entrance, and a thin beam of soft blue light grazed over Tony. There was a happy chirp of positive recognition and the glass doors slid open.

The summer humidity of upstate New York was merciless and Tony was grateful for the climatized atmosphere inside the compound.

The private entrance had deposited them in the back half of the atrium and Peter gazed around, enraptured by the brushed, metallic Avengers _A_ that dominated the center of the principal wall.

A few employees walked past them at a purposeful clip, casting quick, inquisitive glances in their direction.

The atrium was vast and naturally lit (tony had always preferred natural light, but it became more of a necessity in every building he designed after afghanistan) by huge bay windows on the upper floors of the building.

"Okay," Tony said, stuffing his hands in his pockets as he spun on his heels in a single revolution. "Upstairs are the managerial offices. Mine, Maria Hill's, Fury has one for drop-ins, and some others, but those are the important ones."

Peter craned his neck upward to the floor above them, accessible by a modernistic style cement set of stairs to the far right of the atrium or a pair of glass elevators.

"Down there," Tony said, pointing down a wide corridor with windows on all sides, "that's the main entrance. Where the staff and visitors check in."

"Visitors?" Peter asked.

"Usually government people." Tony amended. "We don't have much family. And most of our friends work at the compound or are on the team."

 _Or they used to be,_ Tony thought.

"So, who works here?"

"Ex-SHIELD agents mostly." Tony said, leading Peter to the stairs. "Some of the general lab technicians and maintenance workers are Stark employees, and a couple of the team's lawyers have offices here. And of course, there's us."

"Us?" Peter asked breathlessly as he trotted up the steps next to Tony.

"Yeah, us." Tony said, pushing his tinted sunglasses up to rest in his hair. He looked sideways at Peter with smug neutrality, "Assuming you still want to become an Avenger."

"Wow, yeah. Oh my God, wow. Sure! I mean -"

" _O_ -kay. That's what I thought." Tony said, interrupting what would've no doubt become a string of nonsensical babble.

They headed toward the skybridge that connected the main building to the adjacent wing of the compound. It was exclusively the Avenger's domain, by some sort of socially underlying, unstated rule.

Natasha was already waiting for them at the entrance of the pedway.

"I thought she left." Peter said softly, his face holding a question.

"She came back."

Peter pressed his lips into an accepting sort of frown and shrugged. He wasn't wary of her, but he also didn't know the entirety of the circumstances and products of the war that had ripped the Avengers down the middle.

He knew what had been important at the time.

Tony had been sure to determine Peter's intentions as a hero and his position on the idea of the Accords before bringing him into the fight at Leipzig, but he didn't know about Bucky Barnes, or Zemo's involvement in the dissolution of the Avengers, or Siberia.

Tony was suddenly very reluctant to draw Peter into this world filled with too much danger and hurt and trust and _heart._

He stepped in front of Peter a few yards away from her, looking seriously into his eyes. "You're sure that you're cool with this? With being apart of this team and with them knowing who you are? I know Pepper and Happy know now, but that wasn't supposed to happen, and I'm sorry it did. But you need to be sure that this is what you want."

"It's what I want, Mr. Stark. It's _all_ I want." Peter told him, without a hint of reservation in his voice. He ran a hand through his hair, looking away, "Besides, if I'm going to be trusting them with my life some day, I should probably start by trusting them with my name."

Tony nodded once. "Okay."

They started forward again, and Tony let Peter go a step in front of him as they approached Natasha. Dressed in her combat suit, she appeared more intimidating than usual, with her unreadable eyes and inexpressive features.

Peter walked straight up to her, impressively uncowed by her stoicism, and extended his hand. "Peter Parker."

Some of Natasha's icy exterior melted, as Tony knew it would, and she shook his hand, responding with one of her rare half smiles. "Natasha Romanoff. You must be the spider kid from Germany."

"Spider-man." Tony corrected from his position at Peter's back.

Peter sent him an unrefined look of happiness, and it was the most refreshing thing that Tony had seen in months.

"Spider-man." Natasha repeated, her lips quirking. "I'm Black Widow."

The pair started off down the skybridge, with Tony following at a short distance.

"Hey, why don't you have a name like ours, Mr. Stark?" Peter asked out loud.

"Because it wouldn't make any sense, Parker." Tony shot at his back.

"I don't know," Natasha said. "Dung beetles are kind of metallic looking aren't they?"

Peter snorted.

"Don't be smart," Tony volleyed back at her, slipping comfortably back into the familiar banter. "That's my thing. And, no, dung beetles don't have metallic shells."

Natasha leaned closer to Peter, casting a goodnatured smirk back at Tony, and whispered, "He's just jealous."

They reached the end of the catwalk and emerged onto the observation platform above the massive training facility.

At first glance, it look like an expensively empty warehouse. But it was actually filled with millions of dollars worth of technology. Intensely complex graphic overlay projectors were situated throughout the space, ready to convert terabytes of digital data into a crisp visuals.

FRIDAY was ingrained as thoroughly into this wing of the compound as she was in the tower, and she was the one who programmed the training sessions. She could simulate battle, rescue, and raiding situations according to the scenario that needed practice or fine-tuning.

The holographic projectors would map out a realistic framework, and then a virtual battle would come to life.

Tony had spent hundreds of man-hours writing adaptive threats into the programming. The cameras around the training facility were directly linked to FRIDAY's servers and were devoted to digesting information as they recorded the team's behavior during sims.

Based on statistical analyses, the artificial enemies had the capability to learn and respond according to how the team reacted and perfromed, dependent on the situation.

The settings could be specifically requested in order to practice a unique scenario, or FRIDAY could randomize the data sets to produce a mathematically unpredictable simulation.

It was truly cutting edge, and Tony had grudgingly hosted many notable government officials who had come to admire the technology. The military and multiple defense agencies approached him constantly about making the system available for their own training programs.

While the program wasn't a missile or a gun, Tony was still apprehensive of giving the government any of his tech.

Also, fuck Thaddeus Ross and his _"it's for national security purposes, Stark!"_ speeches.

Since the talk of Accords had begun circulating in government committees and forums at the beginning of the year, Tony had had his lawyers instantly combing through the fine print of various contracts and documentation to avoid any sort of legal dispute over property rights.

Though the Avengers and Stark Industries were technically separate entities, Tony was the sole benefactor of the team and also the owner of his company, and there had been concern that, if the Avengers were to no longer be a private organization, his heavy connections between the two groups would result in a mandatory sharing of technology.

As it turned out, the Accords were approved and the Avengers were made into a public institution. And Tony was glad that he had secured the privacy privileges of Stark Industries and its tech before Ross could warp some sort of legally binding obligation from the Accords.

Tony trailed distractedly behind Natasha and Peter as she led them on a circuit around the perimeter of the sim room. From their height on the observation balcony they had a perfect view of Vision as he interacted with the program below them.

Tony leaned against the railing and gazed down.

Vision was hovering gracefully above the ground, using the Mind Stone to disable virtual flying robots as they zipped from place to place above him.

Noting his determined precision, Tony figured that Vision's choice of simulation was probably significant.

Vision was experiencing _moods._ He knew that Vision had been struggling with coming to terms with his responsibility for what had happened to Rhodey. And he seemed to miss the others. Wanda in particular.

All of those things confused the hell out of Tony.

Vision probably needed somebody to talk to, but Tony was barely capable of acknowledging his own emotions, and he wasn't about to play therapist with a guilt-ridden android who shouldn't even be able to feel emotion at all.

Nope.

He wasn't going to touch that with a ten foot pole.

Tony caught up to Natasha and Peter on the stairs going to the ground level. Peter looked like he was on the verge of a neural overload and Natasha just looked pleased to be interacting with somebody who wasn't trying to argue with her, arrest her, or kill her.

Peter asked questions about everything and Natasha answered them all with a patience Tony hadn't known existed.

"That was Vision back there?" Peter said animatedly.

"Yeah, we'll go meet him later. When he's not firing death rays from his head." Tony said.

"We can try Rhodey." Natasha said. "Last I saw him, he was doing his physical therapy."

They passed the sparring ring, the gym filled with all kinds of weight and cardio machines, a metal door that led to the underground firing range, the olympic sized lap pool that was visible through a wall of paneled glass, and some fully stocked, darkened labs.

Upon passing one of the bigger labs, some distance from the others and closer to the team's living quarters and personal offices, Peter stopped to read the handwritten sign taped to the glass door.

In Tony's big, blocky engineer script:

 ** _Avengers R &D Dept_**

Then, in a smaller scrawl underneath:

 ** _if it looks like i'm busy it's because i'm fixing all the shit you broke or making them better so you won't break them anymore. also, i can't promise that nothing's gonna spontaneously erupt or otherwise explode, so enter at own risk._**

Tony remembered Steve's smile when he'd first seen the note that had been slapped haphazardly to the door. One of those real ones, the kind he did when he thought that nobody was looking.

"Can I -" Peter began hesitantly, then broke off with a sheepish duck of his head.

"Sure."

Peter brightened instantly and poked his head into the lab. The room whirred into life and the electronically dimmed windows on the outer wall faded from an induced black tint to crystal clarity, allowing warm afternoon sunlight to illuminate the room.

Machines blinked and hummed softly. Holographic screens flickered into existence and floated in midair, proudly displaying the Stark Industries and Avengers logos.

It had been only a few days since Tony had last been in here. Since his house arrest had ended about a month ago, he split his time between his labs and offices at the tower, his labs and offices here, and the Barton's farmhouse. And of course, the unending meetings with the UN at their headquarters around the world.

Before, Tony would only make it to the compound occasionally, and never for extended periods of time. He didn't even have a room here. He'd retired from the Avengers after Ultron, and he'd meant it.

Now, he frequented the facility a few times a week. Sometimes to check in with the others, or help Rhodey with his PT, or spend hours on end in his lab.

He still didn't have a room.

He wasn't sure if he wanted one.

Peter drifted away from him and Natasha, focused on one thing. He stopped with his nose an inch away from a protective glass case, silently looking up at the face plate of the Mark I armor. The metal was rough, jaggedly cut, scorched in places, and each dent or wound told a bitterly triumphant story, won through sweat and pain.

Tony's bots weren't the only things he'd scavenged from the floor of the Pacific.

He hadn't put the armor back together for years after he'd dredged it from the ocean, the broken suits, with metal dulled like battered memories, stirring him like a forgotten song.

During the recent days that Tony had spent in this lab the past month, he'd finally worked up the courage to fit the pieces of the original armor back together, and he planned to repair the rest.

Tony was rebuilding everything, _his entire world_ , from ashes, and he figured that restoring the earlier models of his suits was a good a place to start as any.

"You built this?"

"Yeah."

"How?"

"My superhuman ability to be stubborn."

Peter looked away from the armor and asked the question again, more fervently this time, "But _how?"_

Tony thought. "I didn't want to die in a cave."

The answer seemed to satisfy Peter, in a way only dismal honesty could, and he glanced quietly at the armor a final time.

"Do you think I'll ever be as good as that? As you?"

"No." Tony said. "You'll be better."

Peter's head snapped toward him, his mouth slightly parted as if he was frozen somewhere between trying to speak and an inability to form words.

Tony nodded once in confirmation, and shifted his feet, feeling vulnerable but strangely okay with it. If there was one person on this team who deserved honesty, it was Peter.

Maybe it was the kid's unreserved openness, or his impossible maturity for someone so young with so much power in his hands, but there was something about Peter Parker that Tony trusted with every fiber of himself.

And then there was Natasha, who met his eyes evenly. She wasn't shocked or concerned, and her expression held no trace of pity.

Of all the people who had been on the team, Tony and Natasha understood better than anyone how useless pity was.

Tony could make admissions of truth like he just did and know that she wouldn't treat him like he was made of glass. They accepted each other's broken pieces with grace and without shame because neither one of them had anything to prove to the other.

Acknowledge and move on.

"Come on, kid," Tony said finally, backing out of the lab and jerking his head towards the hallway, "let's go make sure Rhodey isn't dead somewhere."

They continued in comfortable silence. Peter was practically glowing and he couldn't seem to wipe the childish grin from his face. Natasha walked at Tony's shoulder, a constant presence that had never wavered for the past weeks since her official reinstatement. Though he would never trust her entirely, Tony was confident that she was genuine.

When they arrived at the physical therapy room, they found it dark and empty, a bright green elastic band discarded on the floor.

"He does laps from here to the hangar sometimes." Tony said, slipping quickly into the vacant room. He opened the clear faced, miniature fridge and extracted a blue gatorade from the selection of sports drinks. "Maybe we'll catch up to him before he gets back here."

They didn't have to go far in the direction of the hangar before they found Rhodey sitting on the floor, with his back resting heavily on the wall behind him. He looked up as they approached, his face drawn in exhaustion, but he smiled when he saw who it was.

"You must be the new kid." Rhodey said by way of greeting, extending an arm for Tony to take. "I'm Rhodey."

"Peter." he said, determinedly keeping his eyes on Rhodey's face, and not on the braces as the joints whirred when Tony hauled him to his feet.

When Rhodey was upright, he swayed unsteadily for a moment and waved Tony off when he reached out a hand to balance him. Tony surrendered and backed a step away, tossing the bottle of blue juice into Rhodey's arms.

"Oh," he sighed happily, snapping the seal on the cap and raising it in a mock toast to Tony, "This is why we're friends." He took a long drink and wiped beads of sweat from his brow with the back of his forearm. "So, Peter, how's the tour?"

Peter beamed and he tripped all over himself as he launched into an a repetition of variations of the phrases, "it's amazing" and "the tech is _so_ cool" and "i can't believe i'm here."

While gushing about the technology at some point, Peter split off on a tangent and started asking Tony all about the physics and engineering behind Rhodey's braces.

Rhodey groaned, "Oh, God. There's another one. Tony, I swear, you're hard enough, I can't do two of you. It'll be like raising two teenagers. This is like college you and now you at the same time."

Peter didn't even hear him, and carried on speed talking mechanics.

"Oh, please," Tony said, unconsciously noting as Natasha pulled her phone from _somewhere_ in her catsuit. "He's not that bad."

"Look at him!" Rhodey said, gesturing to Peter, who was now crouching so that the braces were closer to eye-level, muttering to himself. "He's like a golden retriever puppy."

"I know," Tony rocked back on his heels, folding his arms over his chest and observed cheerfully as Rhodey became the subject of Peter's interrogation. "Isn't it adorable?"

The kid had no impulse control when it came to shiny tech and Tony loved it.

"Oh, Mr. Stark?" Peter said suddenly, jumping up to his full height again. "Can I go see the jets?"

Tony pointed down the hall at the set of glass doors that led to the hangar, "Knock yourself out. But if I see one of my planes one foot above the ground, I'm telling your aunt."

"I swear!" Peter promised as he dashed away.

Rhodey watched him go, mumbling something quiet under his breath. It sounded like a prayer.

"Tony." Natasha started cautiously. "I just got a text from Steve. He says he needs to talk -"

"No." Tony said immediately, going from cheerfulness to burning nausea in an instant.

"Maybe you should…" Natasha trailed off, looking down at the phone in her hands, conflicted. "He said it's important."

"I said _no,_ Nat." Tony bit out sharply, grabbing Rhodey's bicep and tugging him as he started walking away. And if his grip was too tight, Rhodey didn't say anything, just let himself be moved.

They started down the remainder of the hall in silence, Tony matching Rhodey's slow but even pace, leaving Natasha staring uncertainly at her phone.

Tony's stomach churned.

 _He's my friend_

Rhodey cleared his throat after about a minute, "Tony?"

 _So was I_

"Yeah?"

"You can let go of my arm now."

"Right." Tony unclenched his fingers from Rhodey's arm and shoved them into the pockets of his jacket.

Rhodey massaged his bicep absently, his eyes on Tony's face. He didn't ask if he was okay, he'd known him long enough to know that it was pointless in trying. And he probably knew the answer anyways.

"So, I was thinking I could give the suit a try soon." Rhodey announced conversationally. "What do you think?"

Tony knew what he was doing, he'd done it many times before, and Rhodey knew that Tony knew what he was doing.

That's why it worked so well.

"There's a lot more resistance in the suit, but I could upgrade it. Figure out a way to make the hydraulics more sensitive, or somehow attach the framework of the braces to the interior circuitry; so it'd be more like the suit moving with you, instead of you moving the suit." Tony said, and hearing the weariness in his own voice sent shivers down his spine.

One of Rhodey's tennis shoes made a delicate squeak as it scuffed the floor when as his feet started to get closer and closer to the ground, until he was nearly shuffling. His breathing was getting more labored and he took a few seconds to reply. "What about that neural thing you did with your suits a few years back?" he huffed, waving a hand around his head.

"The prehensile technology? It's not in the main design of my armor anymore, there were problems with the subcutaneous computer chips. They were impossible to maintain. The chips kept shorting out and I couldn't use my arm for the rest of the day, it was getting annoying. I've scaled it back. Autonomous capabilities, quicker assembly time, retractable plates. You know, basic stuff."

"Your basic and the real definition of basic are two very different things."

Tony sniffed, considering. "Or maybe my basic is the right basic and everybody else's basic just needs to pull itself together. My basic gets shit done."

"Yeah, and it also electrocutes you when it breaks." Rhodey pointed out dryly. He'd stopped walking, his chest heaving with exertion and fresh sweat rolling in fat drops down his temples. He grabbed onto the metal railing and sat back on it, letting his head rest against the wall behind him.

Tony grunted in partial agreement and he leaned against the wall next to Rhodey. They gazed across the hall through the wall of half windows opposite them. The sky was fading into a lazy, summer blue as the hours in the day waned.

 _So was I_

 _So was I_

 _So was I_

Tony's heart was pounding against his ribs and his chest ached with renewed vigor. While he'd been with Peter, the emptiness in his stomach had been forgotten, but it was back and he could feel it twisting inside him.

He listened to Rhodey's breathing as it evened, letting the reassuring rhythm ground him in the present. He didn't want to be in Siberia, he didn't want to relive that same moment over and over again _every_ _time_ someone mentioned Steve.

He wanted to get over it, but he didn't know if he could.

"You know, you're going to have to talk to him at some point."

"Rhodey, please, I can't do it. Not right now."

Rhodey raised his hands in a gentle, placating gesture. "Look man, I'm not saying that you should forgive him. That's the last thing I'll be saying until he does something to show me that he deserves it. But this is killing you, Tony. Locking this away, it's _not working."_

"You think I don't know that?" Tony whispered hoarsely.

He raised his head, letting his mask fall. Just for a moment. And he can tell that what Rhodey sees in that little glimpse… it scares him.

Tony looked away and reconstructed himself. It was a process he was all too familiar with. He had grown up in the public eye; he knew how to play the game.

Sometimes it felt like he'd been playing so long, he couldn't tell when he was playing and when he wasn't. The game had become his life, and his life was in ashes.

"Mr. Stark? Mr. Stark!"

"Parker, I swear to God, if I go into that hangar and see flames -"

"What? No." Peter said breathlessly as he dashed up, waving wildly with one hand behind him. "It's the panther dude. He just landed in this sick jet."

"T'Challa?" Rhodey asked Tony. He pushed himself off the railing and gazed past Peter.

"He called me this morning," Tony said, shaking back the sleeve of his jacket to read his watch. It was just past four in the evening, so it had been about nine hours since their brief conversation that morning. "He said he had some "sensitive information" whatever that means. It could be the key to unlocking the vibranium vaults, or an ancient Wakandan recipe. I can never tell with him."

Peter frowned, "How'd he get here so fast?"

"Transonic jet." Tony said, straightening the cuffs of his jacket subconsciously. "I proposed the design of a commercial jet that could theoretically top at Mach 1.5 to the Stark Industries board a few months back. Production and trials begin later this year." he added, mostly because it irked him to no end that Wakandan tech was constantly breathing down his neck, and he wanted everybody to be reassured that he was better.

Tony kept well enough ahead of the rest of the technology world, but he watched Wakanda with special attentiveness.

They were already richer, he wasn't about to let them be smarter.

Howard had taught him that.

"Let's go welcome the king." Tony said, clapping his hands together, and banished his father's stern voice from his head.

They met T'Challa just inside the hangar and the Wakandan king smiled civilly at them, extending his hand for Tony to shake. "Mr. Stark."

"Your highness." Tony greeted, trying as hard as he could to burn the sarcasm out of his tone. But wow it was hard. "Call me Tony."

T'Challa nodded once, but his eyes told Tony that although he appreciated the gesture of friendship, he would probably be addressing him as "Mr. Stark" for a while longer.

Tony wasn't saying that he didn't like T'Challa, he was just saying that it would be easier to talk to a brick.

"So, what's so important you couldn't tell me over the phone? Or use the internet. Or text me. You know, technology exists for a reason."

"As I said before, the information is…" T'Challa searched for the right word, "delicate." He glanced at Peter, who was hovering nearby.

"Peter!" Tony said, flicking his wrist in a shooing motion, "Go run with scissors or something."

Peter gave him a look, and Tony looked right back. Between them Rhodey sighed heavily, and he recalled in that moment what his friend had said not ten minutes ago about raising two teenagers.

Oh well.

Peter muttered something under his breath, glancing between them all before shuffling away in the direction of the furthest Quinjet.

"Alright, your majesty, what is it?" Tony asked when Peter had retreated safely out of earshot, turning to face the Wakandan.

T'Challa reached into the inner pocket of his thin, designer jacket and withdrew a collection of photo cards. He passed them over to Tony, his darkly vigilant eyes never straying from his face.

Tony accepted the images and looked at the first one.

What he saw made his blood turn to ice.

"When were these taken?" he asked, his voice devoid of any trace of emotion.

"Yesterday."

And suddenly Tony was standing in a dimly illuminated ballroom, encompassed by the overlapping tones of indistinct conversation and easy jazz. He was standing on the steps, cameras flashing in his face, as his most trusted friend became an enemy. Then he was standing alone, _completely_ alone, holding his legacy in his hands.

 _"Did you know about this?"_

 _"Tony, come on -"_

 _"No, tell me what's happening in Gulmira."_

Out of the corner of his eye, a demon whisked out of sight behind the bulk of one of the jets.

He remembered holding images painfully similar to these, and confronting the one person he thought he could trust above everybody else.

Only to find out that he was the one with the biggest secret of them all.

The memories of Obadiah brought the memories of caves and arc reactors and Steve and guilt and bitterness and betrayal.

Rhodey pulled the photographs from Tony's numb fingers and flipped through them, his face quickly locking down into the familiar persona of a soldier.

Behind him, Tony heard the doors to the hangar burst open. "Tony, please, I really need to tell you what - T'Challa?"

Natasha stalked up to them, her phone gripped in her hand at her side, full of determination. T'Challa's presence barely slowed her down, and she dipped her chin respectfully.

Then she tried again, "Tony -"

Tony ripped the photos from Rhodey's hands and tossed them at her feet, fury at himself and at the cruelty of the world suddenly bubbling up in his chest. "If it's about this, then I already know."

Natasha crouched down and gingerly picked up one of the cards, her eyes flickering over the image with the keen precision of somebody trained to spot detail.

"Where is this?" Tony asked, turning back to face T'Challa.

T'Challa said nothing, carefully observant. Tony got the feeling that he was being measured and that only fueled his anger. T'Challa thought that he would go and violate the terms of the Accords if he knew where his weapons were.

Well, fuck him because yes that's exactly what he was going to do if he couldn't get permission to do it through the proper channels.

" _Where._ " Tony repeated again, and this time he didn't phrase it like a question.

T'Challa lifted his chin and seemed to come to a decision, "Burundi."

Tony spun around, pulling his phone from the pocket of his pants. "FRIDAY, prep whichever suit I have here at the compound, I need it."

"The Mark 45 is ready for deployment, Boss." came the swift reply.

Rhodey jumped forward, and he seemed to wince internally when his braces squealed at the sudden movement. "Tony, wait, what are you going to do?"

"I don't know, we'll see how it goes." Tony said flatly, narrowing his eyes at T'Challa who still hadn't stopped watching him with his intuitive eyes, a small frown tugging at the corners of his lips. "Maybe I'll break the law."

 **XxX**

 **Steve:** How'd he take it?

 **Steve:** Natasha?

 **Steve:** Natasha, it's been an hour. How's Tony?

 **Natasha:** They're on their way to Burundi.

 **Natasha:** I know you don't agree with the Accords, but Steve, this is bad.

 **XxX**

 **mr_stank**


	6. Chapter 6

**DISCLAIMERS: I am not an expert in international policy or politics. I speak minimal amounts of French so I'm sorry if I screwed up. Also, I do not know how to diffuse a bomb. Sorry. But, I do consider myself well informed and educated enough to be able to fake it while maintaining an element of reality and logic.**

 **Chapter Six**

The thing about the past, you never knew when it was going to come back and kick you in the ass. Or how. But when it came, and it did, _it always would,_ it came like an uppercut to the nose, sudden and concussive.

For Tony, it came as a small, war ravaged country in central Africa.

They were on a direct path to Burundi within minutes, leaving the proof of Tony's past in grim photographs scattered across the floor of the hangar.

Peter had begged to come, his eager eyes on T'Challa's back as the king had followed Rhodey up the docking bay of the Quinjet and into the plane.

"You haven't signed the Accords yet." Tony had reminded him without sympathy, his voice ringing like cold flint as it had filtered through the suit's microphones.

"Great. Get me a pen." Peter had said.

"No," Tony had snapped, "If you sign the Accords as they are right now I swear I'll kick your ass so hard you'll feel it in your fingernails. They aren't ready yet, and neither are you."

"But -" Peter had tried, hurt momentarily bruising his youthful features.

"Did I stutter? You will not be signing any shitty, binding government contracts, and you will not be coming to Africa with me. You will stay here and manage the comms with Natasha." Tony had declared with unwavering finality, steering Peter by his shoulders to stand next to her.

Peter had glumly conceded without another objection, scuffing the polished cement floor with his ratty sneakers and shooting a final, wistful glance at the Quinjet as Vision had marched inside, his cloak whipping behind him in a flash of burning gold.

Natasha hadn't been much happier to be left behind.

"Don't do anything stupid, Stark." she had said lightly, but the way her lips had pressed into a thin line had betrayed how nervous she actually was. She had looked like she wanted to say more, but she had aborted into a strained smile, her eyes shifting with careful apprehension.

The flight to Burundi stretched into an eternity, the crawling hours occupied only by the continuous throb of futile negotiations as multiple voices argued over each other through various speakers in the Quinjet.

Rhodey spent three hours on the phone with the UN, trying to scrape together the representatives that made up the committee that acted as the official liaison to the Avengers so they could actually begin discussions. By the time all those that had been successfully contacted were present via conference call, only eight out of the dozen committee members had phoned in. As stated by the Accords, at least three quarters of the council must be present in order to sanction a mission.

They were short one representative. Until another delegate joined the discussion, nothing would be decided.

Tony had to get out of his suit so he wouldn't punch a hole through the metal shell of the Quinjet.

T'Challa managed to establish contact with Burundian officials. He paced incessantly, juggling a pair of phones. At some point, he wordlessly passed off a near hysteric Burundian Army commandant to Tony and returned his attention to the Minister of National Defense, engaging in a low, hurried conversation in Burundi's official language of Kirundi.

The commandant in his ear was racing on in the same language until Tony interrupted in French. It was the first foreign language of the country, and one that he spoke with natural fluency, and he prayed that they could find a mutual form of communication in it.

The panicked man on the other end of the line faltered for a second before stuttering back, this time in heavily accented French. He relayed the rapidly deteriorating condition of the country. He explained how the colonel had led a squadron of Burundian forces against the advancing insurgents only hours before in a desperate attempt to halt their progression into the country's capital. How the whole unit of men had been utterly overrun, ripped apart like wet paper by mortars and roadside bombs with a ferocity that they were unable to match with their own weapons. He explained, over a phone connection that faded in and out with the dry hissing of static, that the remaining forces had been pushed back to defend Bujumbura, and how the citizens who had displaced from refugee camps had no shelter and no protection against the barrage of shelling and gunfire.

The Burundian terrorists were ruthless in their attack, the people were terrified, dying in the streets, and the commandant, the newly most senior officer in the country's military, shamelessly admitted that he had no idea what to do.

"Aidez nous." he said, his voice drowning in the sound of a violent explosion in the background. "Voulez-vous nous aider?"

 _Help us. Will you help us?_

"Je vais." Tony swore, gripping the phone tightly to his ear, listening to the sounds of bombs, _his bombs,_ as they shattered the air and burned through a nation.

 _I will._

Tony turned and brandished his phone in T'Challa's direction. The Wakandan strode towards him, muttering a brief apology into the phone at his ear, and looked expectantly at him.

"He's asking for our help." Tony said. He might've just found a loophole in the Accords, and his mind raced feverishly as he started pulling at the idea. He dug through the recess of his brain, rooting up every phrase and clause of the charter that he could remember, trying to determine if they could actually pull this off. "Let these two talk to each other. If we can get the country's officials to grant us access into Burundi we could circumvent the need for a UN sanction." Tony handed the phone to T'Challa.

"What are you going to do?" T'Challa asked him as he accepted the phone, his open eyes showing how badly he wanted to help these people.

"I need to talk to Ross." Tony said, thinking out loud, already keying up a video connection on the nearest screen. Though he was willing to go against the law in order to save a country full of innocent people from his own weapons and the militants who controlled them, he didn't want to have to do that unless he had exhausted every other possible option. And unfortunately that included trying to reason with the Secretary of State.

T'Challa seemed relieved that Tony was still trying to stand by the Accords, despite his emotional drive to burn it all to the ground in order to make things right. Because, when he slowed down and thought about it, the Accords _were right._ Tony _knew_ that they were right. They were just messy and flawed and untested, but the imperfections didn't make them wrong. It just made them improvable. And if there was one thing that Tony could do better than anybody else, it was improve.

"Will he let you do this?" T'Challa asked as Tony turned to face the frowning image of Thaddeus Ross as it blinked into existence.

"I won't let you do this," Ross declared nearly an hour later. Tony had exhausted himself as he attempted to detail the urgent situation of Burundi and its people, but Ross seemed incapable of sympathy.

"Why the hell not?" Tony spat, his hands clenched into tight fists at his side.

They were hovering at the edge of Burundi airspace. T'Challa had made brief contact with Wakandan Air Defense as the Quinjet had approached the fiercely defended border to keep them from being blasted out of the sky by touchy Wakandans.

Somewhere in the dark corner of Tony's mind, he knew that Steve was down there. But he didn't think about that because right now it didn't matter.

What mattered was that they were being denied entry into Burundi by both the United Nations and Ross, despite the pleadings of the Burundian government and military executives.

So they were locked in a stalemate, hovering at a standstill in the early morning blackness of the African sky, looking westward into the Bujumbura Marie province where the horizon bled an awful orange as fires and devastation swept through the country.

"Because the Accords say no, that's why." Ross said, unyielding. "The Avengers may enter a foreign nation if, and only if, it is sanctioned by a UN panel after it has reviewed the situation."

"Yeah, we know, and we tried that. Four hours ago. And they just barely started discussions after we got a hold of the ninth representative." Tony said heatedly, the words scorching his lips as he said them. He glanced over at Rhodey who was sitting on one of the benches with T'Challa as they mediated between the UN council and the Burundian officials. They looked pained, listening anxiously to the debate that warbled on over the speakerphones and glancing occasionally out the windows of the cockpit to the fires that tainted the black sky.

"Then I guess you'll have to wait until they reach a decision, Stark." Ross said, his face hard and twitching in irritation as he glared from the screen.

"We won't be the only ones waiting, sir." Tony said, hissing the title of respect with everything but respect. "There are over 10 million civilians down there who will be waiting too, and they can't wait much longer."

"The nation of Burundi has recognized the Accords and you are lawfully obligated to uphold them. I don't think I have to remind you what will happen if you don't."

Tony snarled as he whipped away from the screen, stalking to the conference call that was taking place at the other end of the Quinjet. He snatched the phone from Rhodey, his voice slicing through the nebulous web of other voices rising from the speakers. "This is Tony Stark. And I, as well as an entire country, need to know when you'll have a decision for us."

"Mr. Stark," Alan Sabbe, the Belgian representative who acted as the head of the committee, began speaking. By the tone of his voice, slightly placating with just the wrong amounts of authority, Tony could've told him what he was going to say next before he even said it. "The process requires an intense amount of scrutiny. All aspects must be taken into consideration, we must consider the repercussions of sanctioning this mission."

 _"_ _Repercussions?"_ Tony echoed incredulously, narrowing his eyes in disbelief. "Listen, we aren't invading, we won't be trampling over Burundian soil. They _want_ us there. They've asked us, they've given us permission. So why won't you?"

"Mr. Stark, we are doing what we can to review the situation and come to an appropriate decision within a reasonable -" he tried explaining again, but Tony had stopped listening.

"FRIDAY," he said, passing the phone back to Rhodey and tapping at the piece in his ear. "Give me a casualty estimate on the ground."

"Since unrest broke out in Burundi four months ago, there have been a total of 21,000 casualties." the AI answered immediately, accessing archived news and military reports. "Within the last day, the death rate has seen a six-fold increase with an estimated 1,100 casualties over 24 hours. As the Burundian insurgents press closer to the capital, I project there to be 275 civilian deaths every hour."

"That's it." Tony decided, his resolve hardening into something impenetrable and viciously determined. "We're going down there.

"Stark!" Ross roared from his screen. His eyes were ablaze and he leaned across his desk to shove his face closer to the camera, the tendons in his neck stretching and tightening as his entire body contorted in fury. "If you put one toe inside that country, you _will_ be arrested. Do you understand that? You -" He was cut off mid-sentence, his face frozen in the image of spitting anger, as FRIDAY severed the connection.

"Rhodes," Tony said, "let the UN know that they can go back to bed or whatever it was they were doing that took them so long to do their goddamn job. Vision, get us over the capital. The insurgents are forcing their way into Bujumbura, but they've just barely breached the outskirts of the city. We still have time to get there to defend it."

Vision, who had been seated in the pilot's seat quietly keeping Natasha and Peter updated over the private comm channel, complied with the order immediately. Tony turned to leave, but the synthezoid called after him. "Sir, Ms. Romanoff would like me to tell you that you are, in her own words, "the stupidest fucking genius to ever walk the face of the planet.""

Tony wrinkled his nose upon hearing those very human words come out of Vision's mouth in such an impassive, slightly confused, way. "I'm sure she would."

"She also says that the world is lucky to have you."

Tony huffed a humorless laugh through his nose and pondered that statement in silence, making his way to the suit. He couldn't decide whether or not it was true.

If it wasn't for him, Burundians wouldn't be dying in the horrific masses that they were right now, killed by weapons he had designed with the intent of inflicting maximum damage. If it wasn't for him, the world would've have seen one less homicidal AI and it would have one more country.

To him, it seemed like world wasn't lucky at all.

But maybe it was, and maybe everybody but Tony could see that.

T'Challa stood between him and the armor, his body an immovable force in his own suit of flexible vibranium fibers. He looked fundamentally conflicted, but spoke resolutely, "I cannot let you destroy what my father died for."

"I _won't."_ Tony reassured him, irritated that he once again had to defend himself to somebody who was supposed to be on his side while simultaneously sympathetic with T'Challa's instinctual need to protect his father's legacy. "I don't destroy things. I fix them. I make them better than they were before. But I won't let more innocent people die because of me. And if you want, you can go back to Wakanda and sit in your palace and watch as lives that you could've helped save are lost. Now I don't know you very well yet, but I don't think you'll do that. You want to help, I know that you want to help. So when we do this, know that I'll make it okay when it's over. I can get us out of whatever Ross or the UN will throw at us. But right now? _Right now,_ there are people down there who need us. I'm going to help them, and I don't need your permission, but I do want your help. So, your highness, are you going to try and stop me, or are you going to come with me?"

The Wakandan king was silent, an internal struggle boiling inside him. Just when Tony thought that maybe he had been wrong about T'Challa, his posture relaxed with a mighty sigh of admission. "You are a curious man, Tony Stark. But you are right. It would be my privilege to fight beside you."

"Then buckle up, Panther, because you're with me now, and this ride can be a bit bumpy sometimes." Tony said lightly, stepping past T'Challa. The suit opened as he approached and he stepped into its embrace, the metal plates sliding into place around him.

"Uh, by 'sometimes' he means 'always.'" Rhodey said from where he stood a short distance away, listening to the exchange. He waved a phone at them, "Also, I don't speak a language that'll make a difference in this situation. So, T'Challa?" Rhodey tossed the phone through the air and he caught it deftly, holding it up to his ear to speak with the Minister of National Defense once more.

"Fry, connect me with Commandant Sendegeya." Tony ordered, moving to stand behind Vision as he piloted the Quinjet closer to the burning horizon.

As they flew into the nation's urbanized capital of Bujumbura, the silhouettes of small buildings stood out against the flames. The sky was no longer black here. It was a sickly dark orange hue as the light of the fires a short distance to the east was reflected off the dense cloud of smoke and dust that rolled up from the devastation and filled the air. The fighting had not yet reached the heart of the capital, but from their height in the Quinjet, they could see that it wasn't far away.

Tony and T'Challa rushed to coordinate with the military forces. Though Tony wanted nothing more than to dive into the heat, he understood the importance of allowing the country to fight its own battles.

When they were hovering above the modest capital building, Vision lowered the docking ramp and thick clouds of smoke replaced the clean air inside the Quinjet. The acrid stink of burning was so strong, so invading, Tony could smell it through the filters in the suit. But maybe that was his imagination.

Rhodey hid his nose in the crook of his elbow, his eyes watering as he squinted through the harsh smog. He backed away from the open bay of the Quinjet and replaced Vision in the cockpit, sliding into the chair behind the controls with the confidence of a seasoned airman. He flipped a switch on the panel to his left and the air filters began cycling, sucking out the burning smoke and venting fresh air.

T'Challa and Vision stood by the ramp, watching him like they were expecting something. Tony realized, with a jolt that made a sort of emptiness yawn inside him, that they were waiting for him to say something before they fought.

He'd never had to do that before.

The motivational speech before battle had always been Steve's area of expertise. His natural positivity and morality had made him the de facto speech-giver. Always the idealist.

Tony preferred reality.

"We're here to provide support," he began, the calm authority in his voice ringing so clearly it took a moment for Tony to actually believe that it was his own. This was his team now, small and broken and disjointed as they were, they were _his._ The thought made unfamiliar warmth surge through him, driving him forward. "We aren't here to win their wars for them. We listen, we suggest, we do as we're told. We help, we save lives, but we do it the way the people of this country want us to do it. This is their home, not ours. Alright team, kick some ass out there."

"And if any of you come back with more than a few scrapes or bruises, _I'll_ kick all your collective asses." Rhodey called from the cockpit, his tone easy, but years of friendship told Tony that being left behind was harder for him than he would ever admit.

"Noted. Stay close, Rhodey, we might need you." Tony said, reaching out to grab T'Challa's forearm with his gauntlet. T'Challa gripped his arm in return, the vibranium claws safely retracted into the gloves of his suit. "Comms check."

"We're go." Rhodey's voice came in through the helmet as Tony watched him fit a comm unit into his ear.

"We're all good here, Mr. Stark!" That was Peter, his voice a little grainier than Rhodey's as it was transmitted from the other side of the globe. "This is so cool. Can they hear us in real time? Mr. Stark's satellites must have some sweet tech."

"Good luck, you guys." said Natasha over the comms, drowning out Peter's excited digression into communications satellites. "And, just so you know, I second Rhodey's threat. Come back alive. We just got our feet back on the ground, and I'd hate to lose one of you the first mission in. So no dying, it's not allowed."

Vision levitated above the ground and zipped effortlessly out of the Quinjet, gently reprimanding Natasha with cool logic that 'technically death is very much allowed, as it is the natural law by which all life is universally bound.'

Tony followed closely behind him, towing T'Challa from where he clung with notable strength to his arm. The additional weight was unfamiliar, and Tony had to adjust his thrusters in order to compensate for the mass that pulled down at his right shoulder.

Flying deeper into the capital, they watched as explosions of flame that burst in the outer streets of the city grew larger and more real, though still some miles away. Military trucks were making slow progress as they advanced down the roads in the direction of the war zone, civilians weaving in between the vehicles and flooding the streets.

"FRIDAY," Tony said, watching as people below them scurried into buildings or hauled cloth sacks packed with precious belongings out of homes. "We need to find Commandant Sendegeya."

"A squadron of Burundian troops has set up a temporary staging ground about 2 kilometers at your 11 o'clock. Your commandant is there."

Tony blasted off in the direction of the location tag that FRIDAY had pulled up on the HUD. When they arrived at the staging ground, T'Challa released Tony's arm and sailed gracefully to the ground. Tony settled on the pavement next to him while Vision hovered just above their heads.

The people here were in even more of a frenzy. Civilians pressed against them, towing children or hurriedly packed bags, fighting to get away from the incoming onslaught of hellfire. Soldiers were positioned throughout the crowd, directing the people down the safest streets or clearing out the houses.

Tony and T'Challa waded against the flow of people, searching the sea of faces for Commandant Sendegeya. They remained generally unnoticed, the public too intent on retreat to pay them any attention. When they passed through the barricades that had been haphazardly pushed together in the middle of the street, they left the civilian mob behind and entered the military's unsteadily held territory.

True to the reports, the military's weapons were effectively useless against the shells that pounded the streets and buildings, sending debris and dust pluming into the air. The majority of Burundian troops held semi-automatic rifles and they milled around fearfully, unable to use their weapons that were designed for combat, not defense.

A heavily damaged tank was at a standstill a few dozen meters down the road, returning fire at the advancing insurgents. As they watched, the turret spat a single rocket into the air and it sailed into enemy lines, an abandoned building some distance down the wide, crater-pocked street exploding into flame and chunks of concrete.

The terrorists answered with a salvo of mortar bursts. Tony knew exactly what had just been launched at them when he heard the distinct whine of the missiles as they screamed towards them (he had designed the damn things). Apparently the Burundi Army had experienced this particular attack multiple times before, because a cry rose up among their ranks and they dove for cover.

A trio of rockets, distinguishable by three individual trails of fire in the night sky, curved through the air. When they passed their apex and began descending onto them, the secondary engines sparked and roared and the projectiles gained velocity at a horrifically rapid rate, racing towards them. They rained down on the Burundi forces that cowered in dilapidated homes or behind barriers of hopelessly twisted metal. The already wounded tank didn't stand a chance against the attack, and it exploded in a ball of scorching flame.

Tony, T'Challa, and Vision, still far enough back that they weren't in danger of the missiles themselves, were drilled with fragments of smoking metal and gravel.

When the worst of the debris had settled and the flames extinguished, a ragged bunch of soldiers scurried to what remained of the tank, shouting for survivors. There were none.

"There." T'Challa said suddenly, pointing to the soldiers that were stumbling away from the tank, pushed back by a spread of shelling in front of them. Among the group was Commandant Sendegeya, his dark skinned face caked in soot.

The commandant raised a whistle to his lips and blew a shrill signal to retreat further into the city. The soldiers wasted no time, abandoning the provisional staging ground with haste, putting the invading forces to their backs.

T'Challa raised his voice above the din produced by the flurry of movement and caught Sendegeya's attention. The Burundian's haggard face broke into instant relief when he saw them and he ran over, speaking rapidly to T'Challa in Kirundi.

Tony left them to discuss, he and Vision going ahead with the troops as they jogged down the street. They helped clear the last of the buildings, heard straggling civilians further into the city, and move heavy crates of guns and ammunition.

As they moved further from the line of defense they had just abandoned and deeper into Bujumbura, the noise of explosions and gunfire fell to the background only to be replaced by the sounds of a nation in hysteria.

The city, which had been sheltering the refugees from other provinces in neighboring villages, was packed beyond its limit. It was bursting at the seams, filled with people who either lived there or had been driven there.

The comms clicked and then T'Challa was speaking in his ear, "The commandant feels it would be best to divide our efforts throughout the city. I will remain on foot, traveling with the military and directing the people. He would like Stark and Vision to do what they can to destroy the insurgents' arsenal. They have no means to fight against their missiles, but they have a chance if the militants were forced to face them in closer combat."

"Done." Tony said, internally relieved that T'Challa had briefly taken charge.

Contrary to popular belief, Tony did not _always_ think that he knew best. He was not a strategist, he was a tactician. A pragmatist. He wasn't a planner, he ran the numbers in his head and used the tools he had in the moment to act on split-second decisions. He had willingly deferred to Steve when it came to defining a goal or laying out orders, content to be the instrument through which that goal could be achieved in the quickest, most efficient way.

When the situation called for it, he could lead with confidence and people would follow. But he wanted people to call him out on bullshit plans, because that's what most of his plans were. He wanted his team to exercise their individual strengths, because they could see things and do things that he couldn't. He would be their leader, but he didn't want to do it alone.

"Not to make things worse than they already are," Rhodey started over the comms, "but if you guys are going to get a stop, it has to be now. Bujumbura is at the border of Burundi, and it backs right up to Lake Tanganyika. This city is a strategic nightmare. There really is nowhere else for these people to go."

"No pressure," Tony said, lifting off from the ground with a simple command to his repulsion system. "We have our jobs, let's do them right."

And then they were diving into action.

The bitter taste of betrayal that had been lingering at the back of Tony's throat and the miserable anger that had driven itself like a hot stake into his mind fell away as he flew straight into enemy lines.

He skimmed close to the ground, drawing their attention and their fire. Vision soared above him and targeted with deadly precision the unused, short range missiles. The weapons exploded with ferocity that consumed many of the terrorists who were standing within range, and though he hated them, Tony watched them die with no sense of satisfaction.

Peter and Natasha were in his ear, using his geospatial imaging technology in New York to locate the next weapons depot or unit of militants as they converged on the city. Rhodey was in the sky, watching them all with tense care, calling out movements and points of weakness. T'Challa worked flawlessly with the Burundi Army, getting people to the best shelter available and engaging the enemy as they started breaking through the barricades in the streets on foot. Tony and Vision weaved intricate patterns in the sky, methodically reducing the weaponry of the insurgents to smoldering rubble.

Whatever divisions or doubts that had existed between them had dissipated entirely. The uncertainty about their future relationship with the UN and the state of the Accords that had been such a daunting problem before was now an afterthought.

Tony would never have dreamed that they would be able to function so smoothly. He hadn't imagined that this team could really become a team. But they were.

Somehow, they were.

"Boss, I'm reading a heatseeker. It's locked onto our wavelength." FRIDAY announced, "I would recommend evasive maneuvers, but the missile would just follow."

"I designed you to be helpful." Tony snapped, checking the HUD to gauge the distance between him and the approaching ground-to-sky infrared homing device. He performed a sudden barrel roll, shooting off to the side at a sharp enough angle to make his joints protest under the pressure. The rocket followed. "Ah, shit. We were having such a good time."

He was out of flares and Vision was off in another sector. Tony thought about leading the missile into a building, but decided against it. However damaged and broken it already was, they were trying to protect the city, not put more holes in it.

"Rhodes?" he tried over the comms.

"I got you." Rhodey answered immediately, reading the tone in his voice and understanding the unspoken request for backup.

Tony, who had been looping madly above the ground in an effort to maintain some distance between himself and the locked missile, spiraled upward, laying out a clear shot. The Quinjet dropped through the hazy, smoke filled sky and Rhodey intercepted the rocket with a spray of bullets. The weapon detonated below Tony in burst of fire. He cut the thrusters and let the aftershock push him through the air, flipping as he fell with practiced ease and pulling out smoothly once he was clear.

"Thanks, buddy."

Together they turned on the site that the missile had been launched from, opening fire on the stocks of weaponry and terrorists as they fled madly in all directions. Crates and trucks full of his old weapons erupted in billowing clouds of intense flame. Tony watched it all burn, each explosion reverberating deep inside of him, sealing his past.

"That's the last one I think," Peter informed him, "Vision just took out the last depot on the other side of town. That should be all of them."

"We could use your help in the streets. The insurgents have breached the barricades and they've launched a final assault on the ground. The military has engaged, but the people are defenseless." T'Challa said, his message interrupted periodically as he grunted, fighting as he spoke.

"On our way." Tony said, giving a thumbs up to where Rhodey sat in the cockpit of the nearby Quinjet before he shot off over the outer streets of Bujumbura, heading back to the center of the city.

The sky had grown lighter as the morning progressed, the sun a murky half disc of light through the dense smoke and dust as it rose over the horizon, and it became easier to spot the insurgents. They were the ones clad in black with squares of cloth wrapped around their faces, showing nothing but their dark, maliciously glittering eyes.

Tony dove closer to the ground as he neared the fighting, skimming above the streets. Vision joined him within seconds and they became a pair of deadly angels, firing energy and repulsor blasts and guided bullets from the sky. They tore through the enemy as they clawed their way into the heart of Bujumbura.

The number of people in the streets, terrorists and citizens alike, increased as they continued into the city. The bodies appeared more frequently too. Since they had arrived in Bujumbura FRIDAY had been keeping a silent tally of casualties in the bottom corner of the HUD, and Tony watched the number with heavy eyes as it rose quicker the further they flew into the capital.

Though the long-range attacks from the air had ceased, the people were in more danger now than they had been before. The close quarters fighting was messy, the two opposing forces sharing a bloody battleground with civilians. And the insurgents had no qualms about collateral damage. The people truly had nowhere else to go and they hid themselves in blind panic, seeking shelter in fractured buildings or simply throwing themselves to the ground in horrific resignation.

Some meters in front of him, one of the terrorists had cornered a family of three against a concrete wall and a burning military truck. The young mother shielded both of her children with her arms, tucking them close to her as she sagged to her knees, their backs pressed against the solid stone behind them. The children hid their faces against their mother's chest, while the woman stared up at the devilish man who towered above them, tears streaking down her grime coated cheeks.

The terrorist pulled a grenade from his belt and Tony blasted towards them. T'Challa got there first, pouncing onto the man and digging the dreadful Vibranium claws into his shoulder and tearing him away from the family.

The grenade dropped out of his grip and it rolled unevenly on the cracked pavement. Tony knew he had seconds. There was no time to get the mother and her children out of range so he landed roughly, hard enough to split the concrete underneath his boots, and kicked the grenade under the nearby truck, then whipping around to throw his arms over them.

They cowered against his chest plate as he screened them from the detonation. They were close, dangerously close, and Tony felt the heat of the blast that had been magnified by the gasoline that leaked from the abandoned vehicle even through the protective layer of his suit. The people curled even tighter into him, petrified with terror.

When the roar of the fire and the maelstrom of sintered metal at his back subsided, he unfolded from around the tiny family and ushered them to safety. He shielded them from behind as they stumbled away from the worst of the fighting, stray bullets pinging harmlessly off his shoulder plates.

At the end of the road, they merged with a crowd of heaving civilians and military personnel and a sturdy Burundian man surged from the mass of people, grabbing his family's individual faces with his hands, sobbing with relief. As they began to be engulfed by the churning mob of refugees and survivors, the woman reached to clasp one of his armored hands in both of her own. "Urakoze," she cried, _"Urakoze!"_

 _Thank you, thank you_

And then she was gone, swallowed by the crowd. Although she hadn't actually touched him, Tony's hand glowed with warmth and he looked over the Burundian people with a flood of intense protectiveness.

He turned back to where the terrorists and military were locked together in a vehement game of whatever the opposite of tug-of-war was, thrusting into the air to hover above them and firing shots that held strong and true into the enemy's steadily dwindling ranks.

The insurgents were being held back by the Burundian forces now, their numbers fading as quickly as their resolve. Some turned and fled when they realized that they were losing, bullets biting at their heels. The soldiers cheered as they were inundated with fresh vigor and they drove the militants back.

Tony, sensing that it was time for the country's own military to take over and finish this war for themselves, let himself drift to the ground. He landed in the center of the street and watched the last of the terrorists flee before the attacking military. T'Challa joined him shortly, an utterly wrecked Commandant Sendegeya just behind him from where he was absorbed in an indistinctly frantic conversation on a military grade satellite phone.

Tony's confidence in their victory was short-lived and fizzled out weakly when the commandant dropped the phone from his ear and stared up at them, his entire face exuding renewed horror. "Il y a une bombe dans le bâtiment capital. Notre président… on ne peut pas arriver à temps."

 _There is a bomb in the capital building. Our president… we can't get there in time._

"Je peux." Tony said immediately and he fired his boot jets and spiraled into the sky, ignoring T'Challa as he called his name.

 _I can._

It only took him seconds to locate the capital building. It was a nondescript structure with the country's flag fluttering in feeble tatters from a burnished aluminum pole. The front doors hung from their hinges, evidence of a forced entry, and Tony blasted inside.

Immediately inside the foyer, a pair of insurgents snapped around and lifted their guns. Their eyes widened through the slits in the fabric that covered their faces when they saw who the intruder was and one of them grasped for his ancient walkie-talkie.

"I really wouldn't," Tony said, lifting his gauntlets as the repulsors whined with energy.

One of them fired a spray of bullets from his automatic rifle and the other barked something urgently into the communication device, his voice harsh and dead. Tony lunged forward, elbowing the first guy in the nose and grabbing the second by the front of his uniform, pulling him off his feet savagely.

"I told you not to do that," he hissed through the suit and threw the terrorist into the nearest wall, his head creating a web of cracks in the stone. He slid bonelessly to the floor, his eyes open and glazed, blood dripping garishly from his nose.

Their attack did virtually nothing but attract attention and he heard heavy boots pounding around the corner. Tony stalked through the doorway and met the new insurgents head-on, blasting them out of the way with prejudice. He followed the path they had taken to confront him up a set of modest, tile stairs, taking out a lone terrorist as he skidded onto the landing with his own gun raised.

The staircase left him on an upper floor at the end of a single hallway. The corridor was wide with multiple doorways that most likely led to the offices of government officials going down both sides. At the far end, a large set of double doors had been blasted open, the heavy wooden doors splintered and burned.

Tony strode down the hall towards the main office and FRIDAY scanned the floor for movement. "Four hostiles up ahead in the president's office, Boss. And 14 civilians. Heat signatures locked."

The guided bullets rose from the compartment underneath his shoulder plates and they whizzed off, carving neat holes through the plaster walls outside the office. A few seconds later, there were four distinct thuds of bodies hitting the floor and Tony entered the office, scanning the occupants of the room.

A ragged collection of men and a few women sat against the wall to Tony's right. They stared at the bodies of the terrorists who lay unmoving at their feet with wide eyes and then looked up at Tony, hope dancing across their faces.

The bomb was on the other side of the room and Tony's heart lurched in his chest when he saw what kind it was.

"Fry?" Tony said, circling the bomb. He didn't actually need her to confirm what he was looking at, but he wanted to hear it all the same. The cool, business-like mannerisms of his AI were soothing in a way. Objectifying.

"Exodus Class." she responded crisply. "Designed late 2007. Technologically equipped to communicate with a maximum of eight daughter explosives to produce a series of explosions in multiple locations after receiving a detonation signal from the master unit. The average blast is large enough to decimate anything within 400 yards."

Tony found the metal sheet that covered the control panel and pried it off, tossing it to the side. He retracted the faceplate of his suit and peered into the bomb. "And are you detecting any other bombs in the city?"

FRIDAY was silent for a beat as she scanned for matching frequencies. "Five, Boss. Scattered throughout the capital. They're all live and have been linked to this main unit."

Tony swore, his eyes landing on the timer, at about the height of the bottom of his ribcage, which displayed a frozen three minute countdown. Beneath the digital clock was a keypad. When he had designed this, he had included a failsafe for those who controlled it. You could get into all sorts of trouble if your 2000 pound bomb didn't have a failsafe. Whoever set the explosive could also key in an abortion code. It was meant to be impossible to disarm unless the people who set it wanted to _un_ set it.

Tony had never thought about what would happen if the good guys weren't the people who set it. Just like he hadn't imagined what his weapons did to those they were used against until they had been used against _him._

"Mr. Stark?"

Tony snapped his head up, having forgotten about the additional company in the room. He recognized the president, Pierre Mossi, who had pushed himself to his feet and edged hesitantly closer, his staff standing at a distance behind him.

"Can you…" the Burundian president trailed off, his eyes flickering uncertainly to the disconcertingly large bomb.

Tony cleared his throat, observing the explosive once more, "I can diffuse it manually. Well, in theory I can. I've never actually tried because there never was a reason to. No time like the present, I guess" He grimaced when he realized that he had been thinking out loud, "I can do it. And I know this sounds crazy, but you'll be safer in here. There are more of those guys out there and I'm not letting you try and get past them on your own."

Tony left the bomb and walked over to where the four terrorists had fallen, his metal boots striking the carpeted floor heavily. He stooped to pick up the assault rifles and handed them to those who stepped forward to take one. "Stand over where you were and shoot at anybody that walks through that door."

President Mossi gripped the rifle, his fingers curling around the gun as he stared at it. Then he nodded once, determination solidifying in his face. "Okay," he said quietly, like he was reassuring himself, then louder a second time, "Okay."

There was shouting from the floor below and behind him, the bomb chirped three times. _"Shit."_ Tony hissed, hurrying back over to his previous position before the open control panel. The timer was counting down. "Shit, shit, shit. Shit."

He would have to get out of the suit to diffuse it. He needed his complete dexterity to do this and the suit was many things, but conducive to nimbleness in his hands was not one of them. The armored plates folded back and he stepped out of the suit. "Sentry mode." he commanded it, and the armor pieced itself back together and took up a defensive position at his shoulder.

Tony took a steadying breath through his nose and retreated into his mind, searching for the schematics for this particular bomb. He had never been more grateful for a photographic memory than he was in this moment.

He ripped off the timer and let it dangle from the connecting wires, still counting down. He spent a second inspecting the mess of circuitry inside the bomb, plotting the route he would be taking in his head. He would need to bypass all the redundancies and security trips before he could actually diffuse the explosive and terminate the connection between this one and the other ones in the city. Twisting two of the wrong wires together could set off all the bombs at once if he wasn't careful.

Tony dove into the explosive with both hands with years of practiced confidence, sifting delicately through bundles of thin cable. In the background he could hear the shouting come closer, he could hear the footsteps as they pounded up the stairs. But he was focused on not killing half the people in Bujumbura. He disconnected breakers and tore through the plastic coating of the circuits to expose the inner, stranded copper wires, twisting some together and tearing entire cables out and throwing them to the floor.

"Tony." That was Natasha's voice, deceptively calm as she spoke to him over the general comm that he had left in his ear. "Why are your suit's readouts telling me that you're not in it?"

"Because I'm not," Tony mumbled around a bundle of cable he held pinned between his teeth. He was vaguely aware that the commotion coming from the insurgents was right outside the office now.

 _"_ _What?"_ And there was Rhodey. Perfect. "What the hell do you think you're doing? Tony, you're in the middle of a goddamn firefight! You can't just -"

"I can do whatever the hell I want to." Tony snapped back, spitting scraps of plastic insulation out of his mouth, "And right now I have my hands in a bomb, so flipping you off would be a really bad move. Shutting up would probably be in my best interest."

"Your _best interest,"_ Rhodey screeched over the comms, "would be to get back in the damn suit!"

"No thanks," Tony said flatly, two circuits he was connecting sparked angrily as he held them. Years of electric burns and callus buildup on his hands had made him practically immune to the pain, and he watched as his fingers started to bleed with a sense of odd detachment. He risked a glance at the timer that dangled limply by his hip. Two minutes.

"Tony -" Natasha started, her voice bordering on the edge of panic and exasperation.

"No." Tony said with finality, "I can't do this if I'm in the suit. And if I can't do this, thousands of people die. And I will not be the reason that happens. Not again."

That shut them up pretty quickly and Tony sunk back into what he was doing. He heard gunfire. He heard the distinct hum of his repulsers as the armor fended off the attacking terrorists. He heard screams of anger and fear and pain. But he didn't look up.

He was so deeply engrossed in his task that he didn't notice the insurgent that had managed to slip past the chaos and was charging right for him until it was too late. They collided violently, the butt of the other man's rifle thrusting all the air out of Tony's lungs as it was punched into his stomach. They toppled over each other, Tony's hand still gripping the cluster of wires that he had just braided together. As he fell, a massive shock was delivered up his right arm as the circuits were torn completely from the bomb.

Then the suit was there, gathering a fistful of the insurgent's collar and hurling him backwards and into the wall. Tony curled protectively over his throbbing arm, trying to regain feeling in his fingers by opening and closing his hand. When he opened his eyes and saw the disconnected cables clutched in his palm, the pain fled to the back of his mind and he was overtaken by a crippling surge of panic.

"Jesus Christ," he whispered, kneeling to read the digital timer. 30 seconds. _"Fuck."_

"Tony?" T'Challa asked worriedly, and Tony was too distracted to notice that he called him 'Tony' and not 'Stark'.

"I just ripped out the last failsafe. It's going to go off in less than 30 seconds and I -"

"Fix it, Stark." Natasha said, deadly serious. All blunt edges and no emotion. "Fix it."

"I _can't!"_

"You can." she retorted evenly, and Tony wanted to scream. His arm was numb and his brain was fried and his fingers were burned and sliced to hell and he had just destroyed the last sliver of hope these people had. "You said so yourself, you fix things. You can fix this."

Tony thought desperately, searching every centimeter of the schematic in his mind. And oh, yeah. That. That could work.

He lunged forward and thrust his good arm into the bomb until he was up to his shoulder in wires and metal. He groped along the bottom of the explosive until his fingers clasped around a cold box. He dragged it out of the mesh of circuits and pulled a red wire from the connection, replacing it with a white one that ran from a cannibalized knot of other wires. Tony attached the other end of the box to the keypad and sent a silent prayer up to whoever was listening before he pressed the green confirmation button.

The sound of electricity buzzed dangerously in Tony's ears and he dropped what he was holding and watched waves of white energy blaze through the improvised channel of circuits he had created in a haze of tenacity and panic. And the timer froze, flickering sporadically between 6 and 7 seconds.

The breath that he had been holding burned in his lungs and he released it in a tremendous heave. The remaining terrorists were on the floor, bleeding or dead, and the surviving Burundian officials flopped to the ground, some crying and others laughing in shock. He noticed that one of the few women was holding her phone so it faced Tony, and he wondered dimly how long she had been videoing the whole ordeal.

He called the armor back to him and he stepped eagerly inside of it, grateful for the privacy. The adrenaline that had fueled him was already gone and it created a vacuum which was filled rapidly by pain and exhaustion. His right arm was a single, pulsating accruement of blistering pain and his fingers felt raw.

"I fixed it," he announced wearily over the team comm.

"I knew you would." Natasha said, but by the way her voice wavered slightly as she sighed told Tony that she had been scared. And Natasha Romanoff didn't do scared.

"I hate you so much." was all Rhodey said, but Tony knew what he meant.

"Wait, I fell asleep for a few minutes," Peter yelped, his voice slurring slightly over the comms, "What did I miss?"

 **XxX**

Steve's lungs clenched painfully when he watched as Tony emerged from the suit, a lone beacon of hope amidst searing chaos.

His body went nerveless with paralyzing fear when he watched as Tony plunged his hands into the active bomb, his eyes dark with cold determination and his hands ripping through the complex circuitry with unconscious fluidity. One wrong move and he'd be dead.

His fingers crushed the TV remote in his hand when he watched as Tony tumbled to the floor underneath the momentum of an attacking terrorist, his face stiffening in pain as he wrapped around his arm, the suit behind him moving automatically to intercept the attacker.

His heart pounded in his stomach and his vision tunneled and his ears rang when he watched as Tony froze, staring at the broken cables in his bleeding hand and then back at the bomb with a blank face, before snapping back into action with the same iron resolve that drove everything he did.

Steve's entire being was burning, the deepest parts of him, every fiber and tendon and bone, all blazing with unquenchable agony as he watched. That was all he could do: _watch._

This was the closest he'd been to Tony in months. He had flown right over him. They had been in the same country. They were still only a few hundred miles apart.

But Steve had never felt so far away from anyone in his entire life, and his heart groaned under the invisible, crushing force of it.

All he could do was pray as he watched. Pray that nothing bad would happen, pray that everything would be okay, pray that Tony would get back in his damn suit. So he prayed and he prayed and he prayed.

 **XxX**

 **Steve:** Tell him never to do that again.

 **Natasha:** You tell him

 **XxX**

 **A huge shout out and thank you to all of you who have commented or favorited or saved this story. You guys are the reason I write. It's fun and fulfilling for me to see when I can write something that others enjoy, so thank you for expressing it.**

 **If you haven't commented or done anything like that, I am still IMMENSELY grateful that you have stuck it out with me. I took a two year break from writing and this is my first story that I've posted in a looongg time, so those first couple chapter were Rough. So thank you for still reading.**

 **find me on tumblr: mr-stank**


	7. Chapter 7

**So, at this point, I kind of picture Tony in a really difficult place. Because it's been long enough for the worst of his anger to have tapered off, but he definitely hasn't forgiven Steve yet. I don't think that's something you can just get over by yourself, so Tony's not. But if you've seen a change in the way I'm writing him it's because I see him maturing and trying to move on, but not completely ready to let his team go.**

 **He's between a rock and a hard place. I think he's still incredibly hurt and angry, but I think he also misses the rest of the Avengers.**

 **So. Anyways.**

 **Chapter 7 - This Journey Fraught of Desperate Dreams**

The global backlash from what happened in Burundi wasn't as explosive as Tony had been expecting in the days following the incident. In fact, there was almost no backlash at all. The people were rallying behind them, praising the quick action of the Avengers; actions that had ended up being a paramount component in the Burundian victory.

Much of their support stemmed from the video of Tony disarming the Exodus bomb in the capital building. Once the video had been uploaded onto the internet it had gone viral, garnering millions of views worldwide within the first day of its existence. It was all over the news and social media, and Tony watched with disinterest as people analyzed and over-analyzed and did it all again. Most people seemed to admire his determined bravery, but all of them found a way to dredge up his weapons past.

There were of course some people calling for blood, furious that the Accords had been broken yet again. Secretary Ross was among this group, and he was no doubt pitching a fit to the United Nations and any government who would listen. He had left three scathing messages on Tony's phone so far, all of which he listened to whenever he needed to laugh.

The UN was defending them. But maybe 'defending' wasn't quite the right word. They weren't demanding their resignations, which, given the uncertainty of the circumstances, Tony was counting as a win. The official statement they had tendered to the public commended the Avengers and their sterling cooperation with the nation of Burundi while highlighting that their actions, while not entirely compliant with the idea of the Accords, had not expressly violated them. There was to be a hearing the coming week in Vienna where the current writing of the Accords and the standing of the Avengers was expected to be discussed at length.

But for now, Ross couldn't touch them. He couldn't even sneeze in their direction because, in the world's opinion, the Avengers had done what needed to be done in order to keep a country from falling into anarchy, and they had done it in a way that showed the majority of the global population that they were willing to change the way they operated.

So they existed in this weird sort of transitional armistice, not in immediate danger, but with the threat of heavy consequences looming menacingly in the week before them.

Tony enjoyed provisional peace while he could, because he found that he hadn't been able to enjoy anything very much in the past year and he knew that there might not be another chance for a while. So he stayed in Bujumbura for the first few days following the battle, roaming among the people, relishing in their shared victory and simply sitting on the streets with the ones who had lost all they had.

He had sent Vision and Rhodey back to New York once the last of the insurgents had been rounded up so they could manage things on that end and Natasha had shipped Peter back to Queens with Happy the instant the fighting had ended. T'Challa remained with him in Burundi, content to be a grounding presence among the people.

The devastation to the city and the surrounding provinces was immense and Tony received grateful permission from President Mossi to call in the Stark Relief and Maria Stark Foundations to provide much needed aid. They arrived in cargo planes that had been deployed from various SI facilities and remote offices around the world. Some were his employees and some came as volunteers, but all were appropriately eager to help while facing the destruction and death with somber reverence.

Children laughed with their necks craned upwards as they pointed to the sky, racing the planes as they dashed through the rubble strewn streets. The Burundian people who had the will and the energy ran to the massive planes as they touched down in the empty fields of the outer city. Crates of food, hygiene kits, clothing, and medical supplies were driven into the city on trucks that had survived the attack.

They set up stations throughout Bujumbura where the citizens and refugees could receive treatment for their injuries, nutrient supplements for malnourishment, fresh clothes and shoes. Food packages were rationed out, each filled with items that were loaded with calories and carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. Many people clutched the yellow bags close to their chests and sunk to their knees, eyes brimming with tears as they looked up at the sky which was steadily clearing of dust and ash. Other groups of humanitarians set about clearing debris from the streets and quickly rebuilt the least damaged buildings in order to organize shelters for the people to sleep.

T'Challa spent most of his time with Burundi's executives, serving as a temporary advisor as they determined how to revive their country's government after such a brutal attack. Tony joined one of the construction crews and helped as they dug through rubble and prepared houses to be restored. Sometimes they walked through the streets together, stopping to speak words of encouragement or accept heartfelt expressions of gratitude.

On one of these such occasions, Tony found himself suddenly engulfed by a dense ring of children with faces obscured by dust and grime and eyes that had seen too much. But they jumped up and down and beamed at him, using each other's shoulders as leverage to get high enough to see over the heads in front of them. They attacked his legs, with one or two wrapping themselves around each of his shins, giggling with delight.

Tony overcame his initial uncertainty quickly. The days he had spent with the Barton children in recent weeks had made him more comfortable. Whether he was helping Cooper complete a new model, or smiling at Lila as she bounded up to him with a proud announcement of _"Uncle Tony, look at what I painted for you!"_ , or sticking his tongue out at Nathan and grinning like a fucking idiot when the baby babbled incoherently in response, he had learned something incredibly important about them. Kids didn't care about him for his money or his mind, all they wanted was for him to notice them. And it was a concept that was so foreign, so refreshing, it had taken Tony a while to figure it out.

And they were resilient as shit.

The Burundian children shrieked in delight when Tony summoned the suit and it breezed over their heads like an elegant streak of liquid metal that gleamed in the midday African sun. They scrambled away from him and untangled themselves from around his feet as the suit assembled itself next to Tony, waiting for him to step inside.

The plates clicked together softly, securing him inside the armor, but Tony removed the helmet and crouched down in front of the nearest child. She couldn't have been older than five, her head shaven and a silver hoop hanging from her right ear. Most of the children here spoke only in their native tongue so he didn't bother with French, instead holding the helmet up and pantomiming placing it on his own head. She squealed and bounced, her eyes alive, and Tony knew that she'd understood. Smiling reassuringly, he gently placed the much too big helmet on her head and it sealed itself over her face. The impersonal faceplate of his armor sung wildly from side to side and up and down as she spun in circles, staring at her world through the eyes of Iron Man.

It was comic in an endearing way and Tony watched her dance around top-heavily, smiling to himself because this was _good._

Naturally, because one of them had had a turn with the helmet, they all had to have a turn with the helmet. Tony and T'Challa stayed in that spot in the middle of the cracked road for a long time, Tony securing his helmet on every child who grasped animatedly at his arms and T'Challa looking on with a true smile on his lips. The parents of the children and some nearby humanitarian workers watched from a distance, laughing and pointing when every new child leaned every which way as they tried to balance the weight of the armor on their head while simultaneously trying to look at everything at once.

On their last day in Burundi, one of the volunteers discovered a new soccer ball in the bottom of a near empty crate. The outer black and white design was pristine until about half a minute later, when the ball was being kicked around in the dust of one of the main streets as a ragtag game of soccer was formed.

People who had been sitting with their backs slumped against dilapidated homes in utter defeat looked up when they heard the exclamations of excitement, and they pushed themselves to their feet with an energy that hadn't been there before and either inserted themselves into the game or stood on the side and cheered for the players.

Blocks of concrete or scraps of metal were pushed from piles of nearby debris as makeshift goals and children, adults, and volunteers alike dribbled the ball up and down the street, laughing. Laughing despite the fact that most of them had lost family or friends, and nearly all of them had lost their homes. Laughing even though they played not on a field of grass, but of broken asphalt that was pitted with craters where the fusillade of shells had tortured Bujumbura only nights before. Laughing despite it all.

Tony found hope in it.

T'Challa joined the game at some point and he beckoned Tony onto the field, an invitation which he declined with a flick of his wrist. He couldn't really do that. With his decreased lung capacity, running was something he purposefully chose not to do. It was dangerous for him. And with the dust being kicked up in the heavy, evening air by the players' feet as they scuffed the ground, Tony could easily picture himself keeling over in the middle of the street, choking on his own lungs.

And Tony would not let himself go out by playing soccer. Killed by dust. That was simply undignified. Clint would never let him live it down. He would probably put it on Tony's goddamn headstone. And then Natasha would kill him, and Steve would get so bent out of shape about it he would end up looking like a triangle, like he always did whenever they all fought.

And then the smile that had been on Tony's lips hurt like an old bruise. Like the kind you forgot you had until you slammed it against a desk. And the hope that Tony had rekindled inside his chest as he had been with these people, watching them overcome and be happy even when they had every right not to be - that hope was snuffed out and smothered by the pain he had forgotten.

The soccer game became distant and muted, as if Tony was watching it through a thick pane of glass. He sighed and turned away from the edge of the street, weaving his way through the crowd that had gathered to watch. When he cleared the throng, he found Pierre Mossi standing a short distance away, watching his people.

The president of Burundi beamed when he saw Tony and strode towards him with his arms outstretched in a gesture of greeting. "Mr. Stark! I had hoped to find you before your departure tomorrow. Please, walk with me."

Tony made himself smile through the pit in his stomach, falling in beside Mossi as he began strolling down the street. They walked in companionable silence for a while, stopping every so often at random bivouacs and medical tents so the president could speak with the people or wave at the children who watched them pass with wide eyes.

"I will never be able to repay the Avengers for saving my country. I do not know how to thank you," Mossi said eventually, his deep voice rumbling with the depth of his gratitude.

"It wasn't us," Tony said, "You have your army to thank for that. And a commandant that deserves one hell of a medal. We were just here to help."

"Even so, this city would still be in flames if you had not come when you did. And I

would not be here to see this people's survival if you had not come to diffuse that bomb."

Tony didn't mind accepting the credit for that. Even three days later, his arm had yet to regain complete feeling and his muscles sometimes ached with the lingering effects of the electricity that had swept through him. "Yeah, that one was me."

"I believe in the Accords, yet I never believed that I would find myself thanking you for breaking them," Mossi said. "I know you took a great risk when you came to help us. But you saved hundreds of thousands of lives and I can promise you the support of the nation of Burundi next week in Vienna."

"Thank you," Tony replied, humbled by this man's willingness to align himself with his team when they had been so publicly distrusted these past months. "We need all the support we can get right now."

Mossi smiled kindly at him, "I think you already have more than you know. The people love you, Tony Stark. You just have to show the world that you love them enough to let their voice be heard."

 **XxX**

In the days leading up to the hearing, Tony set up a pathetically literal residency in his administrative office at the compound. He spent hours camped out on his couch, sprawled across the entire length of it with a highlighter between his teeth and a ballpoint pen at the ready as he continued his ongoing revision of the Accords.

T'Challa had accompanied him back to New York, genially offering his assistance in the development of their defense and proposed amendments as they prepared to go before the UN. Their successes in Burundi, both politically and as a team, seemed to have weakened T'Challa's reservedness towards the rest of them, and he was becoming increasingly forthcoming as they worked in solidarity. Tony had even extended the invitation for him to claim a room in Avengers' section of the compound to be at his disposal when he was in New York; an offer which T'Challa had graciously accepted.

Natasha seemed to leave the office even less than Tony did, determined to be as involved in the revisions as she could, like she felt that she owed it to them for not being able to do more. She was usually perched on the far end of Tony's couch, his toes digging into her ribs. Without either of them realizing it, they had quickly adopted the same customs that had defined their relationship when they had all lived together at the tower. He would say something, she would tell him to use that brain everybody was always talking about for something other than being an idiot, and together they would come up with something better.

Rhodey had tried to suggest to the three of them (t'challa had silently refused to vacate the herman miller aeron chair behind tony's desk for most of his stay) that there were healthier lifestyle choices they could be making than living out of Tony's office. But he gave up entirely when Tony had absently replied that he'd take his coffee black with that hazelnut creamer he always insisted on having thanks, then stretched over to hand his copy of the Accords to Natasha, requesting that she read back what he'd just written. Since then, Rhodey had commandeered the rug in the center of the space, his back pressed up against the sleek glass coffee table as he added his own changes to another copy of the Accords.

Vision popped up every once in a while, bearing plates of grilled cheese, fresh mugs of coffee, Tony's personal bulk-sized container of aspirin that he kept in the communal kitchen, and a panoptic perspective. He was a voice of untainted logic and his linear way of thinking helped them maintain realistic expectations with regards to how much of the Accords they could actually change.

Once, after Vision had presented them with a moral question that he left frustratingly unanswered, Tony had seen Rhodey look down at the page he was writing on and begin drawing a substantial amount of heavy lines through the revision he had just made, his face skillfully flat, before he ripped the paper out of the binding entirely. Tony had arched an eyebrow at him and Rhodey had pretended not to notice as he swallowed down two more aspirin and crushed the paper into a tight ball.

It was hard. There were things that Tony wanted to be in the Accords that never would be and there were things that he wanted to burn from the documents but couldn't, because this whole thing was about compromise.

The world wouldn't suddenly allow the Avengers to cross sovereign borders just because they had earned some points back in the trust column after Burundi. But they could make changes to that rule and find some middle ground between what the people wanted and what they wanted. Neither of them would ever be completely happy with the end result, but Tony thought that it was better than the alternative.

The Accords as they were now would inevitably drive an even deeper schism between the world and the Avengers. Tony could see it happening. The beginning of it had _already_ happened. One side was happily getting what it wanted and the other side was furiously bound, and the stress of such an uneven balance had divided them in two.

Tony knew that if the Accords stayed exactly as they were, soon the world and the Avengers wouldn't be able to coexist, and then there wouldn't be anyone left. Nobody would win that battle.

And it wasn't just the world that Tony was doing this for. The Accords had ripped the Avengers down the middle, the jagged edges of the tear like pointed teeth, feral and bared in a manner of warning. But Tony had promised to make them work for the team, and just because half of them hadn't trusted him enough to let him do it didn't mean that he wasn't still going to try.

He wasn't trying for him, but for Natasha, who would stare at the archery targets in the firing range like she wasn't seeing them; and for Vision, who would flip through Wanda's handwritten recipe books with a pensive frown molded carefully onto his face; and for T'Challa, who needed the experience of being on a team even if he didn't know it yet (like tony had); and for Rhodey, who had developed a special friendship with Sam Wilson over the past year as they bonded over stories of their tenures with the Air Force; and for Peter, who deserved to know the Avengers as Tony had once known them, not as this discordant and volatile mass of conflict and mistrust they had become; and for the Bartons, who Tony could only do so much for until it became something he couldn't fix - a hole he could not fill.

He did it for them. Because each of them had been robbed of something valuable or someone irreplaceable, and if Tony could do something to fix that, then he would work and bleed and fight for it until he couldn't anymore.

 **XxX**

After almost two days of using the same pen, it finally sputtered out weakly and died. Tony felt strangely remorseful when he dropped it into the waste basket in his office, so he dug through the bottomless pit of crumpled paper until he found it again, and he slipped it inside one of the empty drawers behind his desk, completely baffled that he felt guilty about throwing out a ballpoint pen.

(This becomes an unspoken tradition that they hold to for the months to come. When they run out of ink in a pen or a highlighter as they're revising the Accords, they put it in that drawer in Tony's desk. It's their way of marking progress, every empty cartridge a testament that they've tried. _Every day they try._ )

 **XxX**

"Get out of my chair."

"Why?"

"Because my lawyer is going to walk in any second and I'm probably the one that should be sitting at my desk. And also because it's my goddamn chair. But I mean, if you've shed all over it you can just have it."

T'Challa's lips twitched, but his face remained unflinchingly even as he stared back at him. He made no move to abandon his place behind Tony's desk.

"King or not," Tony said, "I will kill you and drag your dead ass out of that chair."

"Oh, God, Tony. I have enough on my plate already without having to get you off murder charges."

"Julia Wilburn," Tony turned towards the door of his office to find his personal lawyer sashay into the room. "Just the person I wanted to see."

T'Challa moved to get up from the much contested chair and Tony watched his eyes go round when he was standing, a barely discernible whine in his throat as his legs protested the sudden movement after being mostly unused for the past three days. Tony almost bit off his own tongue in an effort to keep himself from laughing.

"Ms. Wilburn," T'Challa said, sweeping up one of her hands and placing a mild kiss on her knuckles. "It is a pleasure to meet you."

"Oh wow, I like him a lot better than I like you," Julia said happily, watching T'Challa as he settled himself stiffly on the couch next to Natasha, like he was made of rubber. "How come you never kiss my hands?"

Tony dropped gracelessly into his chair, which was permanently warm because T'Challa had turned it into his home apparently. "Because I know that you'd probably rip my lips off."

"Probably," Julia agreed. She started walking towards Tony's desk and nearly tripped over Rhodey, who was facedown on the rug, dead to the world. Julia tilted her head at Tony, the length of her blonde hair swinging over her shoulder, her eyes demanding an explanation.

"We've been working," he said, flicking his hand in a dismissive motion. "He'll probably be like that for the next four days. Just leave him."

Julia sighed and stepped neatly over Rhodey's back, her demeanor morphing from the light-hearted banter that she had rode into the room with into comfortable professionalism. "What do you need, Tony?"

"Here," Tony said. He pushed a copy of the Accords across the surface of his desk so she could reach it. "We've consolidated our revisions into that copy. I need you to make it sound lawyerish. Oh, and I also want you to make sure that there's something in there that ensures the privacy rights of Stark Industries. We've already done that on our side, but I want something written into the Accords that they can't fight."

"Covering all our fronts," Julia mused, nodding to herself as she flipped through the rough revisions. "It's better to set precedence now than wait for something to come up later."

"Right. I don't want Stark to just be able to defend itself, I want it to be legally impossible for them to even launch an attack. We've got teams on the ground helping finish up the repairs in Leipzig and Lagos, and I've put our new Sollux Tech acquisitions on the hospital going up in Burundi within the year. I don't want to feel any pushback on this. It needs to be clear that there is no legal ground for Stark Industries to be held under the same laws as the Avengers, it's a privately owned institution and it will remain that way."

"Anything else? Got a mountain that needs moving? Maybe I could part an ocean for you," Julia said dryly, shutting the Accords and tucking the book into her elbow.

Tony grabbed a pen from his desk and twirled it between his fingers lazily, regarding her from his relaxed position behind the desk. "Are you done?"

"I was just getting the obligatory bitching out of the way. This hearing is in, what, two days? That's a lot of work you're asking me to do in not a lot of time."

"But you're the best," Tony said. "That's why I've stuck with you for so long."

"You mean why you poached me from my firm and practically begged me to stay for the better part of two decades."

"Please. I _saved_ you from that firm. And I distinctly remember a certain junior partner begging _me_ for a job. Because you knew that to be the best, you had to work for the best. And besides, polishing up these revisions won't take you that long. We've already done most of the work for you. I just need you to add some flair, work some magic, do all that legal shit that you're so good at. You know, boring stuff that I don't want to do."

"You know what, maybe you should be your own lawyer if you think you're so great at it," Julia said.

"Yeah, and while I'm at it maybe I can poke my eyes out with a fork and pound my toe with a pipe wrench, because that would _really_ make it a party." Tony jabbed the pen at her to accent his point, "Lawyering is your job, leave me to mine. Physics and mechanics. Those things are much more exciting."

Julia made a face like she didn't possess a single shred of belief in her entire being that the words "physics", "mechanics", and "exciting" belonged in such close proximity to each other. "Fine. But can I at least steal one of Tobler's associates? He hates it when I do that."

Tony bounced back in his chair and used his heels to spin him in tiny arcs, "Do whatever you need to do to get this done. And I don't see any reason why you can't get any joy out of antagonizing Tobler while you're doing it. Just make sure that I have an official copy of those amendments by Thursday."

"Done," Julia said with precise finality. She shifted the Accords to her other arm and reached for the bottle of aspirin that sat on the corner of Tony's desk, "And I'm going to take this."

"Yeah," Natasha said from the couch, massaging the bruises under her eyes. "It's empty."

"How the fuck?" Julia said bluntly and shook the bottle, listening for the rattle of pills. When it made no sound she swept them all with a blistering gaze, "You're telling me that you finished off this entire bottle in three days. I don't know whether I should call an ambulance or be impressed."

And Tony thought that that was an unnervingly accurate summarization of their entire existence.

 **XxX**

They spent their last day in New York doing everything but thinking about the hearing.

Tony tinkered with the design of the Mark 47, running tests on variations of the new energy dispersion system he'd been working on, but his heart wasn't entirely in it. He'd end up staring blankly at the results on his screen, trying not to obsess over how critical it was that they secure another win in Vienna. Because if they didn't win now, nothing would change. When he ultimately realized that he wasn't making much progress with the suit, Tony gave up and went to find Rhodey. He helped him complete his circuits and stretch and then they just sat and talked, in a way they hadn't been able to for a long time.

"It's hard to go to the bathroom with the braces on."

"Well, I could always add an apparatus - "

"Don't say apparatus. That makes me feel uncomfortable."

" - that would collect and filter - "

"Oh, God, Tony never mind. Forget I even said anything about it."

"Are you sure? I have something like it in my suits. Works perfectly."

"Just stop."

"Okay."

"Thanks."

 _"…Apparatus."_

"Get out."

After Rhodey locked Tony out of the PT room, he sparred with Natasha, just like they used to, until his breathing made his shoulders ache and there wasn't one part of his body that didn't hurt. When he finally dragged himself out of the ring, T'Challa took his place and he and Natasha spent the better part of an hour trying to end just one round.

That night, Tony laid awake on the couch in his office, resolutely determined not to close his eyes. He had slept for less than an hour, jerking awake when he watched half of Bujumbura crumble under the heat of six Exodus bombs. He'd flailed to awareness, choking out a command to FRIDAY to check the news reports, so disoriented and filled with a chilling panic that he'd blindly forgotten that they'd been able to stop that from happening.

He didn't sleep after that. He was tired of watching his arc reactor shatter under Steve's shield and he was tired of being betrayed over and over and over, again and again every night. He was tired of watching the world die and tired of watching himself die and so very, very tired of watching his parents die. He was just _tired._

They flew to Vienna the next evening. Rhodey had stayed behind, not quite ready for a public appearance when he was still, very noticeably, recovering. He'd said that the Avengers needed all the good PR that they could get, and if he could do something to make sure that the world wasn't distracted by the liability of a crippled hero, then he would happily do it.

"You aren't a liability, Rhodes," Tony had said, pulling him aside on the tarmac before he followed Natasha and T'Challa up the staircase into his jet. "You know that?"

Rhodey had smiled at Tony like he was being ridiculous, slapped him on the shoulder, promised to watch the whole hearing even if listening to Tony's voice made him want to fall into a coma, and purposefully edged around his original question.

The flight passed slowly and uneventfully, their time mostly occupied by reviewing the official revisions that Julia had emailed to him via FRIDAY. They flew through the night, landing in Vienna a comfortable two hours before the hearing was scheduled to start. A driver was waiting for them on the runway and they were shuttled through the city, with its narrow streets and unhurried rivers and neoclassical architecture.

The south wing of the United Nations offices was still under construction, scaffolding pieced together in a misshapen pipe framework that crawled around the structure. The building was skeletal and painful to look at. T'Challa wouldn't look, turning his body in a way that kept that end of the complex constantly at his shoulder - and whether that was an intentional method of avoidance or something recently branded into instinct, Tony didn't know. But he understood it.

Julia Wilburn was waiting for them in the annular walkway between the outer ring of member states' flags and the shallow pool in the center of the courtyard. She started on a path that intersected precisely with their's as they were escorted towards the main entrance, her blonde hair falling in loose ringlets down her back. She always made her hair the most noticeable thing about her upon first inspection, _"makes it that much sweeter for me when I bite their presumptuous stereotypes in the ass"_ she always told him.

Tony didn't know why he seemed to consistently surround himself with women who could beat the shit out of him any given day of the week, verbally, physically, or otherwise (natasha was _eternally_ creative), but he did know that he wouldn't have it any other way.

"Listen," Julia said quickly once she fell into step at his shoulder, skipping the pleasantries and going straight to what mattered, her eyes intense. "I've been feeling around for the past couple days, trying to get a read on the mood at the UN, and, contrary to tone of the statements they've made to the public, they're not happy, Tony.

"I mean, you have the support of the people, but that's not the only thing that's at play here. You broke the law, and the entire world could throw you a fucking parade and build monuments to the heavens in your honor - but it still won't change the fact that you broke the Accords. There are some people in the UN - not very many, but they exist - that just want the Avengers _gone_. They think that all of you are more trouble than you're worth. And you're here with a laundry list of amendments that they won't even like in the first place, but I'm worried that you won't be able to get that far."

"We need a way to get them on our side," Natasha said from her spot just behind them. Tony didn't need to look at her to know that she was getting all snarly, "But if we don't have their support after Burundi, I don't see how we'll be able to get it now. Burundi is the only publicly affirmed move we've made in, I don't know, more than a year? This isn't going to be easy."

"Oh, and not to make things worse," Julia continued, absently nodding her thanks at one of the UN security personnel as they held the door open for them, "but I think Secretary Ross is here. It's not the United States Representative that'll be speaking, it'll be him."

Tony heaved a relieved breath that he didn't know had been caught in his chest, "Finally, something that might work for us."

"Tony," Natasha said his name slowly, like he might've misunderstood, "Ross _hates_ you. How can this be a good thing?"

"Because we are not the only ones who have broken the law in recent months," T'Challa answered for him, looking at Tony knowingly, his eyes gleaming with the hidden fire of a hunter who felt the wind change in his favor.

The call for general assembly rippled throughout the crowd of reporters, officials, and other representatives in the atrium. Tony was shuffled through a security checkpoint, waiting with a sense of resignation for the alarm as he passed under the metal detector. Even though he'd been expecting it, he still huffed in irritation when the machine screamed at him, because being annoyed was so much better than thinking about _why_ he was annoyed.

He was drawn away from the flow of traffic by a security officer, who told him apologetically that he would need to perform a full body sweep with a wand. Tony said nothing and spread his arms compliantly. When the scanner passed over his chest it went wild, the whine of the alarm attracting the curious gazes of people nearby. Natasha frowned at him from where she was collecting her personal effects from a plastic bin, her eyes calculatedly soft.

The guard looked up from the wand and awkwardly met Tony's eyes. Tony stuffed his hands in his pockets and projected his trademark, blasé image, explaining to him the pacemaker, the screws, and the titanium mesh that held his chest together like it was boring. Old news. Which it was, but that didn't make it any easier to say.

People looked at him differently when they knew - like he was damaged goods. He was being looked at that way right now, like he might fall apart at any second, and Tony swallowed his irritation, fighting to keep the snarl off his face.

He smiled instead. Lying was easier when you did it with a smile. There were no words, no opportunities to give something away or show weakness. Because words were funny like that.

 _"Don't speak unless you know that you'll win,"_ his father had told him. _"Every time you open your mouth, you make sure that whatever comes out is sharp enough to cut through everybody in front of you and fast enough that they won't know they've been bleeding out until it's too late."_

 _"Everybody,"_ Tony had repeated, not understanding at 14 years old why anybody would want to train themselves to be that kind of person. Why would you want to make them bleed?

 _"Everybody,"_ Howard had said coldly, _"Unless you want to make friends. But to make friends you have to be prepared to lose. And even when you have them, friends aren't worth anything but pain."_

 _"Do you have friends?"_

 _"Of course not, and if you're smart, like everybody says you are, then you won't have any either."_

The security officer stepped aside with his head slightly bowed, his eyes tracking away from Tony's and fixating on a point near his left ear. Tony swept past him, his chest filled with a pulsating coldness like he could feel the metal grinding inside him, and smiling like it was the easiest thing in the world.

Natasha was waiting for him outside a set of doors that were being propped open as the participants of the hearing filtered into the chamber, flashing authorization badges and official press passes at the security envoy that stood guard at each entrance. "Okay?" she asked.

"Why wouldn't I be," Tony said, not looking at her and instead concerning himself with the maintenance of a cufflink that didn't need to be straightened.

When he looked up at her again, he noted the hard set of her jaw and the way her eyes seemed to catalog his movements - the way his fingers moved too stiffly as he pulled on the sleeve of his suit and that his breathing was too deep, like he was trying to drown out the sound of something else with the noise of his lungs drawing in and pushing out air. Her gaze flickered up to his eyes, and Tony was confident that she would find nothing there, because he'd trained himself _to be that kind of person._

 _"Don't let them see you bleed,"_ his father hissed in his ear.

"They're waiting for us inside," Natasha said finally, "The secretary-general is going to begin with his opening statement soon."

"We don't want to miss that," Tony muttered to himself, following the last of the stragglers into the room, "That would just be _tragic."_

Together they navigated the massive auditorium, weaving through rows of long tables that were arranged in widening arcs that faced the central bar, where the heads of the First Committee sat in their respective positions, the emblem of the United Nations fastened to the wall above them. Delegates from numerous countries milled about behind their desks, the sound of conversations in multiple languages rising with a buzz that filled the room, the press detached themselves from the participants of the hearing and took the seats that lined the walls, and the camera crews arranged their gear in the glass boxes some distance above the floor.

Across the room, in the front right corner, Tony caught a reassuring glimpse of the Burundian delegate. They locked eyes for a brief moment, recognition flaring between them, and then the man nodded at him before taking his seat.

"Ross," Natasha said tersely, nodding in the direction where the secretary of state had set up at his own table.

Tony slipped into the chair beside Julia at their bench, leaning forward as he eased himself down so he could see where Natasha was looking. Thaddeus Ross was one aisle to their left, shuffling through papers and listening with one ear to the attaché who was whispering intently at his shoulder.

The man sitting in the middle seat of the raised podium at the front of the chamber cleared his throat, looking to his colleagues as he spoke into his microphone to address the room. "If you could all take your seats, we will begin with opening statements."

There was an empty moment as the movement and noise in the hall died down, the only sound the rustling of papers and an occasional cough. Tony took this moment to notice that the carpet was an unforgivable shade of green.

The secretary-general opened the folder on his desk and took a drink from his glass of water, he looked out over all of them, pulling the microphone closer to him as he began speaking. "Let it be known, that on this day, the 27th of July, the United Nations Security Council has convened for a special session in Vienna regarding the Nation of Burundi, the conditions there that led to a forceful intervention on the part of the group known as the Avengers, the subsequent consequences of their actions, and the standing of the Avengers and the Sokovian Accords hereafter. We will hear statements from any country or committee official that has prepared and submitted their reports and a post hoc justification presented on behalf of the Avengers by Mr. Anthony Stark. The meeting will continue from that point as outlined in the provisional agenda."

It only took 37 seconds of that verbose introduction for Tony's soul to decide that it wasn't going to stick around for this shit. He felt it get up and leave his body, and Tony desperately wished that he could follow it out the door. He detested the periphrastic formalities that the UN clung to.

"All in attendance have received the brief explaining in great detail the situation in Burundi, so I will therefore keep my remarks short," the secretary-general said, and Tony snorted softly, playing with the corner of a scratch piece of paper on the table.

"Within the last four months, we've seen an escalation of terrorist activity in Burundi. In response, the government forces increased their military operations in several areas in the country. Military advances were stalled and accompanied by large-scale evacuations of Burundian citizens when the insurgent forces launched offensives using late model weapons manufactured by Stark Industries.

"Within those four months the death toll had risen to some 21,000 civilian and military casualties. Two weeks ago, as Burundian ground forces were attempting to reclaim lost territories in the outer regions of the Bujumbura Marie Province, the militant forces began their final press to take the capital. The Avengers approached Burundian airspace, maintaining lawful distance outside of the country's borders."

Tony still couldn't get over the carpet.

"We have the telecommunication records between the United Nations oversight committee that has been assigned to liaison with the Avengers and the Avengers themselves, as well as the transcripts of the conversations that were held between King T'Challa of Wakanda, Tony Stark, Burundi's Minister of Defense, Marre Obadele, Commandant Claude Sendegeya, and Secretary Thaddeus Ross. Before receiving authorization, the Avengers entered Burundian airspace, at the explicitly stated request of the nation's officials and military leaders, and provided defensive and offensive aid in the city of Bujumbura.

"The matter this session has been called to discuss is the legality of the actions of the Avengers and potential amendments to the Sokovian Accords. Representative Jean Bosco Ndimira has the floor."

The attention transitioned to the man that Tony had made eye contact with before the hearing had begun. Ndimira squared his shoulders and started reading from his prepared speech in heavily accented English, "On behalf of President Mossi and the people of the Republic of Burundi, I express our gratitude towards the Avengers and the critical role they played in the defense of our country. They acted in exemplary cooperation with our military and protected our people and our livelihoods. We will forever be in their debt.

"Concerning the Sokovian Accords, the laws established in the Accords dictate that the Avengers cannot enter any sovereign border without a United Nations sanction, but if they had not violated that law, Burundi and its people would have fallen to a terrorist regime. If the laws created to ensure a greater protection of the people do not fulfill that intent, then the laws must be changed."

Representatives from eighteen different countries and four security committees had their turns after that, and each one had nothing original to add to the conversation. There seemed to be a general consensus among them: the Avengers had helped save a country, but they had broken the law to do it, albeit a law that did not include the circumstances under which they had determined to break it.

At this point, Tony figured that the only reason that heated debate hadn't yet broken out between different countries and the Avengers was because nobody could figure out where exactly they stood. It wasn't until Ross took control of the room that Tony sensed a shift in that dynamic.

"While I applaud the quick actions of the Avengers and the vital support they provided for Burundian forces in securing peace for the nation, we cannot ignore the blatant disregard of the law. Laws that they promised to abide by in contractual agreements that they signed in early May. In almost three months, the world has yet to see evidence of any regard for these laws as the Avengers continue to infringe and exploit weaknesses in the Sokovian Accords.

"Mr. Stark will most likely address us today in the hopes of convincing the world that the Avengers accomplished a right by first accepting a wrong; and because of the positive outcome of their actions, that wrong should be excused. But the simple truth is that Tony Stark used his position as an Avenger in order to gain entrance to Burundi after he learned that old shipments of his company's weapons had been seized by insurgent forces. It was a personal vendetta under the guise of international security, and it was a gross abuse of power."

Natasha had maintained an impressive neutral air throughout Ross' speech, but the faint tick in her jaw gave her away. Her hand crept to Tony's knee under the table and clamped there, squeezing either as a way to relieve some of her anger or to assuage his. Maybe both. Because Tony was pissed.

He would not deny that the catalyst that had driven him to order the team to Burundi had been those images. The ones that T'Challa had shown him that day in the hangar of the compound. His weapons, his legacy, _his fault._

And that was how Ross had played it. By watering the seeds of doubt that had been planted in the world years ago - that Tony didn't actually do anything for the benefit of anybody but himself.

So yes, Tony had gone to Burundi when he learned that his weapons were being used there. But he hadn't gone because of his _weapons,_ he went because there were people there, children and mothers and fathers and families, who were being hurt by things that he had created.

 _I want to_ ** _protect_** _the people I put in harm's way_

And if the world didn't understand that _that_ was the entire reason, the whole _basis_ on which Iron Man was built, then no amount of explaining was going to make them see it. So Tony took that anger and drove it down deep, where it wouldn't bother him again.

This was all a game. Ross had made his move and had dealt Tony his hand, but it had the card that he needed to win the game.

Ross took his seat, visibly pleased himself, and took a leisurely drink from the glass of water on his desk, like he'd just won the battle. He flicked his gaze over at their table across the aisle, and with a smug twitch of his lips, tipped his glass in a mock toast.

Natasha went rigid beside him, and her steel grip on his knee tightened even further. She was like a spring, coiled and filled with so much potential energy that Tony worried that he would need to find cover if she got set off.

"Natasha," Tony chided her quietly, trying to pry her fingers off his leg. "I don't think that flipping the Secretary of State over his table with your thighs is proper United Nations etiquette. So stop thinking about it."

She huffed something that might've been a laugh if she wasn't distracted by murderous urges, and whispered back, "You don't want to know what I was thinking."

Ross' comments seemed to open a floodgate, and they spent another two hours listening to almost two dozen countries rage about consequences and "abuse of power." Tony smiled at the horrible carpet every time he heard the term used.

When the period for countries and committees to make their statements finally ended, the secretary-general invited Tony to begin the presentation of their defense. "Mr. Stark?"

Tony made a show of shaking his head briskly, like he was waking up. "I'm sorry, I'm just stuck on the part Secretary Ross so helpfully pointed out in his statement. Something about an abuse of power? Okay, sure. I can play this game too."

The instant Tony had started speaking he'd felt a very distinct change in the mood of the room. The hearing up to this point had been adamantly formal, with statements made to the audience as a whole and not directed at individuals. Tony had grown up attending galas and fundraising events, leading board meetings and playing war when closing a business deal. He was direct, he was eloquent with a unique bluntness and without the verbosity of politics. He was talking to Ross.

Tony knew that you couldn't simply command a room and expect everyone in it to fall into place, not if you wanted results. He played people like they were pieces in a game, and he knew that if you played the right pieces, if you played the right people, you controlled the board.

"You want to know what else is an abuse of power? Throwing my team into the Raft, a prison I helped design for the intent of securing and monitoring _real_ threats, not just people who got in your way, and using shock collars to subdue them."

To his right, Julia made a strangled noise in her throat and started whispering in furious undertones, _"You are still under investigation for that prison breakout and I swear to God, Stark, you will keep your goddamn mouth shut."_

"I've read the Accords front to back, I've read them back to front, I've read them in a box, and I've read them with a fox. I've read them more times than I ever wanted to read anything in my whole life. I can tell you what's on all of those pages, and imprisonment in the Raft isn't one of them. In fact, according to Article Five Section Eight, any Avenger found in violation of the Sokovian Accords shall be permitted a comprehensive review of his or her actions and an official trial."

And though it was true, it hurt, it hurt so much to choke out the words around the knot of heat in his throat. Because here he was defending his old teammates to the world, and they probably had nothing more to say to him than the quickest route he could take to drive himself to hell.

"So you want to talk about an _abuse of power?_ Why don't you take a look in the damn mirror. _Sir."_

The crowd murmured and a rush of muted conversation swelled up, cameras flashed in quick succession during the lull, and Ross was steadfastly resisting the urge to respond to Tony's attack, his face deceptively unperturbed and cold.

"Mr. Stark," the secretary-general snapped from the dais, "watch your language."

"I am," Tony said, satisfied that he had managed to turn the scrutiny away from the Avengers and onto Ross, trying not to think about the last time somebody had told him to clip his tongue, "You should hear my thoughts. But as long as we're talking about consequences, let's just consider that my team might not be the only party at fault here."

The secretary-general covered the microphone with his hand and leaned to his left to speak to Representative Sabbe. The Belgian man nodded in agreement with whatever he had said and said something indiscernible back. The secretary-general returned to his microphone, "Secretary Ross, did you, at the time of the arrests of Clint Barton, Sam Wilson, Wanda Maximoff, and Scott Lang, have any grounds to imprison them in the Raft?"

"Only that they were in the process of aiding and abetting an international fugitive - "

"He was innocent," Tony interrupted before he knew what he was saying.

" - and gone rogue and acted incongruously with the Accords, wreaking havoc in Romania, a CIA field office in Berlin, and the Leipzig Halle Airport," Ross said.

"They hadn't signed the Accords," Tony countered.

"Then they should've been stripped of their status as Avengers," Ross argued venomously, finally turning his head to glare at Tony.

And that - that _stung._ It hurt and it hurt so much and so unexpectedly that Tony at first didn't recognize the ache in his stomach for what it was: as the realization that they weren't Avengers anymore. And it was such a strange and baffling concept that Tony couldn't organize his thoughts well enough to think about it.

 _I don't want to see you gone. We need you, Cap_

Tony took a fortifying breath, the echo of Siberian wind chilling his bones, "The point is, they didn't deserve to be there. They didn't deserve to be treated that way. The Accords were sprung on them, and they believed that what they were doing was right. They aren't innocent, but neither are any of us. I promised them that I would fix the Accords," Tony held up his copy of the amendments and dropped it in the center of his table, "and that's what I'm going to do."

His words hung heavy and unanswered in the air, charged with electricity and a determined taste of iron. Unyielding and unapologetic.

On the podium, the secretary-general fingered his own copy of the original Accords and the supplemental binder of proposed revisions, thoughtful. "You intend to bring them back?"

"I intend to give them the option," Tony said. "We need them."

"And Sergeant Barnes?"

Tony's lungs turned to stone and he stared unresponsively at the speaker for a beat. He had not been expecting this conversation to happen this soon after the explosive conflict over Bucky Barnes just over two months ago.

The world had a bleeding heart for sob stories like Barnes'. They saw a man who had been broken physically and mentally and twisted in something terrible and they wanted to fix him.

Tony knew what he needed to do, but he didn't want to do it. The opportunity to begin mending things was staring him in the face and all he wanted to do was shoot it between the eyes. He had the power to start making things right between him and _them._ But, God, he didn't want to do it.

Why did he have to be the one to do it?

Tony's ears roared and his vision grew blindingly white, and when he spoke it sounded like he was hearing it through a tunnel, "He deserves our help."

Afterwards, when their amendments were approved, when the session ended and when he escaped the swarming journalists and the flashing cameras, and when Natasha helped distract the press so he could slip away into a quieter wing of the facility, he locked himself in the men's bathroom and heaved violently into the toilet, heat in his eyes and ringing in his head.

His fingers gripped the edges of the porcelain like it was the only thing anchoring him in reality, like it was the only thing keeping him here in this cramped stall as he knelt on the unwelcoming tile and choked and shuddered and just tried to _breathe._ Breathe through the pain in grating, spasmodic gulps of stale air during the intervals when he wasn't spitting bile out of his mouth.

His mind was howling. There was so much noise and he would never be able to unhear it. The sound of his father begging for his mother's life, the sound of Barnes' metal fist fracturing the bones in his face, the sound of his mom calling out for him, and the sound of nothing after it was all over.

There was so much pain and he didn't know where it all came from, where it started and where it ended. Phantom pains in his chest and familiar, aching pains in his heart and deep pains in his bones and pulsing pains in his head and raw pains behind his eyes.

And old pains that bruised and clawed at his soul like they were hungry for another piece of him even though he had nothing left to give.

It was all just pain. Fathomless and unforgiving and cold, the kind of cold that swept through him with a vicious snap of frigid air and stole and stole and stole and burned and left nothing behind except the cinders of something that used to be there but just wasn't anymore.

So he ducked his head against the cold that tore through him and he fought to keep himself standing upright against the gale, gripped by a visceral terror that if he fell, he wouldn't get back up again. And he hung onto a glimmer, a reminder, a _memory_ of warmth as the pain scorched through him, searing and cutting and taking.

 **XxX**

In his dream, he's younger. He's younger than he ever remembers being.

He slips out of his home, through one of those big glass doors in the back, leaving the heat and the noise of his father's party behind him. He always hated these nights. When Jarvis would help him into a suit that was more expensive than some people's cars and gently remind him how important it was for him to behave and _"don't forget to smile now, Tony, you know how much they like it when you smile."_

And Tony would nod and go downstairs and smile without feeling it at people he didn't know because his father had taught him how to pretend. He's good at pretending.

It's summer, the last summer he'll spend at home before he goes to boarding school in Alexandria. The night isn't any cooler than inside the house, but Tony thinks that it's better out here because at least he's alone. There are no cold hands on his cheeks, placed there by women who think he's too young to see through their fake adoration, no sharp stink of whiskey, blown into his face by men who bend down to tell him something he doesn't care about.

There's just him, the garden, and the stars.

He sits on the edge of the stone fountain, listening to the murmur of the water, the hum of cicadas in the woods nearby, and the muted noises of the party inside his home, and stares up at the sky. It's a clear night and the blackness of space seems to be swirling with pinpricks of light. Tony loves the stars. He thinks they make the sky seem alive, like it's breathing.

Then his mother is sitting beside him, seeking refuge from the party too. They sit here a lot, especially on these nights. They look at the stars together and she teaches him their names, because she's very smart and Tony wonders why nobody seems to notice.

"They look at me funny," Tony says, thinking of the women in tight dress with jeweled fingers and the men with medals on their chests or wearing fancy suits.

"Because you're important," his mom tells him.

Tony wrinkles his nose, "Why?"

"One day, everything your father does and everything he has, it will all be yours," she says, but she does not sound happy about it.

He picks at the fabric of his pants, thinking. "What if I don't want it? What if I want to go see the stars?"

His mom smiles when he says that and picks up his hands and holds them close to her chest. She's warm. "Then go see the stars."

The breeze changes and the sound of tinkling glass and empty laughter and indistinct conversation drifts over them as it's carried from an open window. He looks at his home and wonders why they need such a big one. Tony thinks that it must be for the same reason he always has to smile. Maybe they like it when your house is big.

"Can I tell you a secret, Tony," his mom says softly. Her voice is always soft, much different from his father's.

"A secret?"

"Yes," she says, smiling at him. She's quiet for a while, tracing the outline of his fingers where his hands lay on her lap. Then she stands up and kneels in from of him, the skirt of her nice blue dress brushing against the stone path. "You have a gift, my love. A very special one."

Tony frowns at her, trying to feel what she was talking about. He doesn't feel anything special. "What kind of gift?"

"You can see things. Things nobody else can see. And you see them in here," she says, placing her finger in the center of his forehead. There are glittering diamonds in her eyes that reflect the light of the stars.

"What can I see?"

She smiles (his mother smiled a lot when he was younger) and spreads her arms to the sky, her voice filled with awe, "The future."

And she's right. He can see the future - he can see it so clearly that sometimes he doesn't know that the people around him don't see it too. He tries to show them, to explain it, and most times it makes them happy, like when he figures out how to produce self-sustaining clean energy. But sometimes it makes them angry, like when he creates a homicidal robot that was meant to protect the world (because he saw that they needed it). Or when he agrees to sign away some of his freedom in order to avoid something worse (because he saw that they needed that too).

 _Futurist,_ Clint Barton spits the word in his face, and the way he says it makes it seem like a sin.

"They don't believe me," Tony tells his mother, and he's older now. Much older than he was when she died. And he's tired. He's done things and seen things and he knows that the world is scared of the future. "You told me once that this is a gift, but you were wrong. It's not a gift, it's a curse."

And she smiles at him, reassuringly, like she knew something he didn't. Then she fades away, her face blurring into nothing like the way the colors of the sky do after the sun sets.

And then it's dark. The kind of darkness you can feel - heavy and suffocating. He throws his arms out blindly, trying to find something he can touch, but there's just nothing. Everywhere he turns, there's nothing. But not the kind of nothing that's just empty space, the kind that's inhospitable and hostile, like something couldn't exist here even if it tried.

When he can see the stars again, Tony wants to go back to where there was nothing, because these stars scare him.

They're not the stars that his mother showed him. They aren't his stars, and the realization is terrifying. They're foreign and burn with cold fire. He's seen them before, years ago, when he crossed through the hole that had been ripped in the sky above New York, the weight of the world resting between his shoulders. These stars are on the other side of that portal.

He looks around and finds one of those horribly familiar holes, with edges of blue flame, and there are legions and legions of that same, dreadful army funneling through it. Behemoth ships and scaled creatures with armor of metal and Chitauri soldiers with eyes like black holes and teeth like daggers.

And through the portal he can see a familiar night sky, one that he studied with his mom, with stars with names like Sirius and Vega and Arcturus. And he can see the Earth, illuminated like a glossy marble, the brilliance of it's colors glowing in the vast blackness of space. Beautiful and defenseless.

 _Not this, please, God, not this_

There's laughter behind him, cruel and throbbing with power. It cuts through him, freezing his nerves, and whirls around. He can't find where the chilling laughter is coming from, but he sees six points of vibrant light. Glowing stones.

 _Infinity Stones,_ Thor called them once.

Energy rolls off them in waves, ancient and ethereal, but not inherently evil. Not like the laughter that hasn't stopped since Tony first heard it. As he watches the stones ripple with mesmerizing light, the laughter crescendos and a massive fist emerges rom the depths of space, dark and shapeless, and it swallows the stones up.

The colored light seeps through in tiny splinters, growing brighter and brighter and more blinding until Tony can't look anymore and it washes over him, burning. And that laughter fills his ears, inhuman and vindictive. The light is penetrating and scorches through his eyelids, bathing everything in a purifying, cosmic white. It hurts, like he can feel something important withering inside him.

When the pain stops, Tony opens his eyes and he's standing in a different kind of light. A familiar light. The sun is a round disk above him in a cerulean sky, giving life and warmth and hope to a world in jeopardy of losing it all.

He sees his team, standing a distance in from of him, two factions on either side of a crack in the earth. They're facing each other, weapons raised and faces hard, the chasm between them like an open wound. He sees Natasha and Rhodey, T'Challa, Vision, and Peter. He sees Clint, Wanda, and another guy he thinks he's supposed to remember, and Sam. He sees Steve and he sees Bucky Barnes.

And he runs toward them, because he doesn't care about the fracture between them. He doesn't care that Steve lied to him. He doesn't _care_ that Barnes murdered his parents.

 _He doesn't care_ (even though he does).

But there's no time for him to care. Because he's seen what's up there. And it's not just a distant threat this time; they're _coming_ and they _don't_ _have time for him to care._ They're coming, like he said they would, and they aren't ready for it.

The words are rising up in his throat but they die on his lips as he's slammed to the ground. He rolls to his knees and presses his hand against the wall that he ran into - a sheet of glass separating him from them. He scrambles to try and find away around it, but he doesn't get three steps before he runs into another wall. And another. And another.

They're only feet away and Tony can't do anything except scream, trapped in a glass cage, pounding on the walls, pointing to the sky where the first of the ships have started to appear, hoping that somebody will hear him.

They never do.

And by the time they notice the attack on their own, it's too late. It's far too late.

He watches the world die. And he watches his friends burn. It only takes a few minutes.

By the end of it, Tony's kneeling on a blanket of ash, his knuckles split and bloodied from punching the glass and his throat torn from screaming. And it's only him and the dying sparks that hang listlessly in the air and that terrible laughter that he can't escape.

 _This isn't a gift, it's a curse_

And the glass shatters around him as he screams.

 **XxX**

Tony found himself in the semi-darkness of his lab, looking out over the skyline of Manhattan and listening to the night sounds of the city, and turning that damn burner phone over and over again in his hands - staring at nothing but seeing too much.

He wanted to call. He wanted to call so bad. Because Steve might've lied to his face and left him and hurt him more deeply than anybody he'd ever known, but he couldn't shake off the choking horror of that dream.

He didn't want to do this alone.

He wished that Steve had believed him over a year ago when he'd said that they needed something bigger to protect the world from something they couldn't beat alone. He wished that he would've trusted him when he'd said that he could fix the Accords - all he had to do was wait, that was all he had to do.

But Steve hadn't believed him and he hadn't trusted him. And now Tony had to do this alone, all because he couldn't swallow his self-righteousness and _wait._

Tony's hands wrapped tighter around the phone, anger washing out his fear, and he twisted and hurled the phone across his lab, watching with a flood of miserable satisfaction as it shattered against a section of cement. The plastic and metal bits fell to the ground with finality, and Tony stood there, his hands curled into fists because he didn't want to feel them trembling.

He looked around his lab, with it's silent machines and scattered tools and dark screens and his bots humming quietly in the corner (he had fixed them up and brought them to the tower at some point in the past year). The familiarity of it all soothed him and his breathing normalized and his mind stopped screaming. He hadn't realized he had been on the verge of a panic attack until the tight bands of heat around his lungs loosened and the sound of his heartbeat faded.

He knew this place. He knew how to use these tools - the fit and feel of them ingrained in his hands, like they were just extensions of himself. He knew the quickest way to turn his body against an explosion when something decided to malfunction or how to put out chemical fires in under five seconds. He knew how to speak to these machines and understand what they told him. He knew how to fix things so they never broke again. He knew how to bring things to life. He'd done some pretty amazing things in labs like this one.

So. He would do this alone, because he knew that he could. And he would prove to himself and to Steve and to his team and to the world that he would not fuck this up.

Tony shook himself, like he was emerging from icy water, and he had FRIDAY open a new project and - because yes, goddamn it, he _is_ a nostalgic puddle of sap - he called it POLARIS.

 **XxX**

 ** _"And that one there," his mother crouches next to him and points to the sky, pulling him close so he can see where she's looking. "Do you see it? That one is called Polaris. No matter where you are, you are never lost when you have Polaris. Remember that, my love."_**

 **XxX**

 **That dream sequence? I started writing that before I fell asleep one night and then I gave myself that dream when I was asleep. It was the most surreal thing ohmygod.**

 **Also, that part between Tony and his mother when they're outside looking at the stars, I'd written that as if it ACTUALLY happened. That wasn't just something Tony made up.**

 **A huge thank you to all of you who posted a review or saved or favorited or followed the story. Your feedback means a lot to me, so thank you :)))**


	8. Chapter 8

**I feel like I've died, been buried, and risen from the dead it's been so long since I've posted. I'm sorry for the wait. I lost a lot of motivation thinking about having to write this chapter. But I finally choked something out, and I don't think it turned out too horrible.**

 **I changed something of minor-ish importance. In one of the previous chapters, when Natasha and Tony go visit the Bartons, I wrote it so the kids didn't know that Tony was Iron Man. Which I realized was A) probably seriously underestimating the intelligence of children and B) was incredibly hard to maintain. So I went back and rewrote that section of Chapter 3 - maybe it was 4, I don't really know - so that it's clear they're cognizant of who Tony is. That detail is important in this chapter simply for continuity reasons.**

 **Chapter Eight**

Tony didn't have very many good memories.

He remembered watching his father rip through the private lab in the basement of their family home, fueled by a toxic blend of manic obsession and enough whiskey to make the air feel combustible with its fumes. Completely unhinged. He would mutter feverishly to himself as he flicked through the worn pages of various notebooks, each sheet a whirlwind of incomprehensible scribbles, notes and formulas all scratched furiously onto the paper from his last drunken nights of hopeless revelation. He would scream at Tony about _the only good thing I ever did, why won't this just_ ** _work,_** _goddammit, why can't you help me make this work_ and spill whiskey all over the surface of an incomplete model of the familiar red, white, and blue shield that he would pull out and throw onto a workbench, pacing restlessly in front of it like it held the answers.

He remembered having his first drink when he was six years old. His father had forced the glass into his hands on one of those nights when he was too drunk to remember that Tony was his son and told him to down the whole thing and to stop crying when the drink had gone down like liquid fire, making his chest burn and stinging his eyes.

He remembered listening to his mother and his father yell at each other downstairs, their voices rattling the entire house down to its foundations. He remembered staring at the images of Captain America on the pages of the book that Jarvis would try to read him over the sound of his parents fighting and he remembered realizing two things. One: that he was a cheater who had become a hero because other people, smarter people, had figured out how to make him one. And two: that maybe if his father wasn't so busy chasing after Captain America and whatever they put inside him, he would be the one reading Tony these books and telling him these stories instead of being an inaccessible, callous vestige of what a parent should be.

He remembered being led through the police station the morning of December 17, 1991 and feeling a hot flash of misplaced and confused anger when nobody would look him straight in the eye and give him the truth.

(tony decided that the truth sounded like the mind-shattering whine of temporary paralysis devices and felt like the bite of Siberian air on his face and tasted like the metallic heat of blood in his mouth. the truth wasn't something you wanted. but it was something you needed. there was nothing more devastating to a life than the realization that it was all built on a lie. you could build a house of cards on a lie, but you could build a fortress on truth. and too many times tony had been left with his hands filled with the tortuously apathetic faces of kings, queens, and jacks.)

(a lie would keep you happy, but the truth could save your life. the trick was surviving it.)

He remembered walking into the morgue, breathing in that sterile air and blinking twice when they had turned on the vicious white lights that illuminated everything - like a thousand heartless suns, whose only job was to expose the truth, indifferent to the damage that it would cause.

He remembered the coroner folding down the crisp linen sheets and then moving a respectful distance away to leave Tony standing at the heads of two reflective metal slabs. He had shut down then, like a screen had been drawn over his eyes. The emotion, the anger and the fear and the sadness, they all just became words that he knew, not things that he could feel. Nothing else mattered to him but the facts. He could understand those.

 _Fact: he's my father._

 _Fact: she's my mom._

 _Fact: they are my parents._

 _Fact: they_ ** _were_** _my parents._

He remembered thinking about how Christmas was in a week.

He remembered the world moving on once they had their fill of his pain. He remembered moving on with them. But maybe he didn't move on, maybe he just forgot. Moving on carried with it the implication of closure, but Tony hadn't gotten that. He'd been left to hear the whispers of drunk driving circulate in every possible media outlet and to inherit an empty house that echoed with old arguments and a company that he didn't want.

He remembered numbing himself, following after his father into a bottle that never emptied. He remembered forgetting.

 **XxX**

Tony managed to extract Peter from his summer activities the day after returning from Vienna on account of an official Stark Industries Internship project. They holed up in Tony's lab at the compound, putting Rhodey through a cycle of tests to determine mobility constraints and rigidity ratios of the newest model of his braces. Tony had promised Pepper that he would have the final product polished and ready to unveil at the SI board of directors meeting early the next week, and he was close.

He taught Peter how to use FRIDAY's technology to run advanced simulations that compared chronological series of physiological and mechanical evaluations of Rhodey's progress and recovery over the past three months in order to pinpoint precise areas of improvement. Peter was a quick study and had a brilliant mind, so it only took him a few minutes of mumbling to himself and flitting between the screen of simulation datum and the holographic projection of schematics for the braces until he flailed off his stool in excitement when he discovered how to interpret the statistical analysis.

Now, Peter was hovering at Tony's shoulder, watching him interact with the writhing mass of holograms as he made adjustments to the hydraulics in the joints of the braces and run simulations on each new modification.

"Kid," Tony snapped his fingers under Peter's nose to grab his attention and spread his arms to throw up an enlarged array of performance factors attributed to each variant. "What do you see?"

Peter stepped up next to him, his fingers moving to manipulate the projection. "What's the baseline?"

"Rhodey's wearing the Model 3 with a functionality percentage of 92.4." Tony supplied, watching him closely.

Peter crossed his arms and gestured to the wall of holograms, "Then these delta values are negligible. None of the variations of the Model 3 are going to be that much of an improvement over what Rhodey's already wearing. So - so the braces are already as good as they're going to get? They're perfect."

"Ooh, he said the cursed word," Rhodey said to Tony from across the lab. "Also, your coffee maker is being moody."

"Okay, first, her name is Juliet. And she likes it when you say please and thank you," Tony told him in a perfect deadpan. Rhodey frowned at him, actively recalling past experience with Tony's inventions to try to determine whether or not the coffee maker was actually sensitive to politeness. Apparently, Tony had the kind of life where weird shit like a sentient coffee machine wasn't unusual because Rhodey rolled his eyes and muttered something rude and unnecessary about singing toasters and emotional coffee makers, turning back to the counter to try and have a civil conversation with Juliet.

"Second," Tony continued, ignoring Rhodey's enduring pursuit after coffee and prodding at Peter's shoulder with a finger, "there's no such thing as perfect in our world, Parker. Perfection is an illusion. But," he considered with pride the glowing schematic of the high-tech orthotic, "they're pretty damn close to perfect."

There was a rapid _schlick-slap_ of sweaty feet and flip-flops outside of Tony's lab, a completely foreign sound to the Avengers compound, and he turned to the entrance to find Lila and Cooper Barton skid to a breathless halt by the glass doors. "Uncle Tony!" Lila grinned wildly at him, while Cooper gazed around the workshop with eyes the size of an owl's on ketamine.

"Barton Spawn," Tony greeted them, looking to Natasha, who followed behind the kids at a much slower pace, for an explanation. It wasn't that he had forgotten that the Barton's were coming to the compound today - it was just that he had done exactly that and forgotten that the Barton's were coming to the compound today.

Natasha bounced Nate on her hip. She was wearing her hair up in a ponytail and a plain white, cotton swim dress hung loosely from her shoulders. "Laura and the kids are passing through. They're going to stay with her sister in Pennsylvania for the week, they just needed a place to stop for tonight. You offered to host. Two weeks ago."

"We're going swimming," Lila told him excitedly, tugging at the shoulder straps of her floral bathing suit. "Do you want swim with us, Tony?"

"You know what," Tony said, smiling at her even though his entire body felt infinitely heavy under the crushing weight of another memory - water in his mouth, rushing in through his lips as he screamed, the taste of it like bullets and blood. Water in his eyes, dripping from his hair as his head was wrenched back and he fought to plant his gaze on anything that wasn't rock. Water in his lungs, rasping in his chest and burning, drowning, he's drowning, _Tony!_ \- "water and I aren't very good friends."

"Oh," Lila said quietly, apologetic, like she had personally been the one to alienate him from any recreational activity involving water. Then her eyes brightened with an idea, "I can teach you how to swim. It's not that hard. And it's fun once you learn how to go underwater."

"Uncle Tony actually has some work to do," Natasha stepped in, putting her free hand gently between Lila's shoulder blades, her knowing eyes finding his. "Pepper's here."

Tony started at that, "The compound? Why?" The board meeting was in a few days, and Pepper never pushed schedules unless she had to.

"Work," Natasha shrugged, but the way she said it made it seem like there were hundreds of possible interpretations of the word. "Why is Rhodey talking to your coffee maker?"

Was he still doing that? Tony looked over his shoulder and saw Rhodey, hands clenched into fists at his side, honest to god _begging_ the machine for a cup of coffee. The most definitely _not_ sentient coffee maker. It was just coded to respond only to Tony's fingerprints because he was paranoid and overprotective of his coffee. And because nobody else in the entire building seemed to understand the common decency of making a fresh pot of coffee if you were the one to finish it, so of course he was going add security mechanisms to defend his. "Beats me. Guy's had a rough couple months, Nat, give him a break."

"You're an ass," she declared with conviction.

"A good looking one too," Tony winked at her and Natasha shook her head wearily, making wide gesturing motions with her arm to round up Lila and Cooper.

"Have fun working," she called back to him as she herded the kids out of the lab and back in the direction of the lap pool.

"Right," Tony muttered to himself, watching Natasha's retreating back skeptically. He sniffed and spun on his heels, shoving his hands in his pockets. "Peter, I got a woman to see about a thing. You stay here and improve the exoframe. Find ways to decrease the mass as much as possible without changing my designs, lowering the electrical potential of the system with a buffer zone of 5%, or lowering the performance factors by anything greater than 0.25%, got it? Oh, and you can't change the material either. I'm a fan of carbon fiber and so is the medical community."

Peter's eyebrows scrunched together and his mouth twisted in a scowl of confusion, "Then how do expect me to decrease the mass if I literally can't change anything?"

"I expect you to use your brain."

"I don't know," Peter shot back contemplatively, "How well does it pay?"

"Funny. These braces have almost a dozen subsystems, I would start there. But I'm no mechanical engineer. Oh, no, wait," Tony said, gesticulating vaguely to his head like he'd just remembered something of monumental importance, "yes, I am."

Tony clapped Peter's shoulder as he breezed past him, relishing in the way his jaw ticked in irritation. The more time they spent together, the more Parker seemed to realize that Tony's personality was vastly different from the stoicism and hard immovability that the suit he wore made him to be. The respect was still there, but the childlike awe when Peter first saw him sitting on the couch in his small Queens apartment had metamorphosed into a more realistic admiration accompanied with something like brotherly annoyance.

And Tony would so much rather be seen as flawed but always pushing himself to be better, to fix his mistakes, than to be hoisted up on a pedestal that he didn't deserve and never would. He would so much rather teach Peter that you didn't have to be a perfect hero. That there was no such thing. Because wasn't that the point?

 **XxX**

He found Pepper in the solarium.

Naturally lit and extensively spacious, the solarium was Tony's favorite room in the compound after his lab. He'd built it for Steve. Or at least, Steve was the one who he knew would appreciate it the most. When they had all lived together in the tower, Steve spent most of his free time sitting cross-legged in the loft with an open sketchpad on his knee. Tony owned the most impressive view in New York City and Steve had taken advantage of the light, the space, and the unbeatable skyline. So when Tony had set about drawing up the designs for the compound, which would become the new home for any active Avengers, he had been sure to incorporate a solarium into the plans.

Steve's art supplies were still in the front right corner, untouched and screaming at Tony with a pitch like rusty nails on metal.

In the adjacent corner, Pepper stood with her back facing him, scrolling efficiently through her phone. She'd brought a memory.

Tony stared at it, tilting his head and parting his mouth slightly, trying to find words but unsuccessful through the influx of memories. Memories too complicated to call good, but not painful enough to call bad.

"Pepper," he started, his voice scraping like he'd gurgled staples. Pepper's head darted up from her phone and her eyes crinkled as she smiled at him. Her eyes had always done that. Tony had always associated laughter lines with age, but they made Pepper seem ageless. Infinitely more genuine than almost everybody that Tony knew. Happy. And god knew that her happiness was his happiness. He had not been lying when he had said years ago that she was the one thing he couldn't live without. Tony cleared his throat and swallowed around the knot of heat, "What is that?"

Pepper folded her hands in front of her and swiveled to look behind her, silent. She glanced back at Tony, who had stopped in the middle of the room, still a few feet away. "I watched the hearing yesterday," she said conversationally, the slight, methodic jump of her index finger on her wristwatch betraying how nervous she was at his reaction to her gift. "I know how hard it must've been for you to defend them, to defend _him,_ to the world. And to have to pretend like nothing bigger happened here than what the public actually knows. I thought," her finger stopped tapping as she clenched her forearm with her hand and she blinked at him, biting the inside of her lip like she did when she was unsure, "I thought that you might like a reminder of her."

Tony didn't respond to her immediately, but approached cautiously, like the memory might explode if he came closer. He could feel Pepper's careful eyes on him. When he was at her shoulder, they examined her gift together.

The midnight black of the piano's frame was dull, the epoxy finish lackluster under decades of disuse, and his fingers itched to reach out and polish it until it gleamed, because his mother's piano had never been anything except immaculate. _His mother's piano._ Tony felt his chest expand with something refreshingly cool and unbearably hot - a feeling that he couldn't name.

"How'd you get it here?" Tony asked, circling the piano, tracing every curve and every edge with a keen eye.

Pepper smoothed a loose strand of hair into her ponytail, "The caretaker of the old Stark property - "

"Esperanza," Tony interrupted distractedly, even though the name didn't hold any particular significance in Pepper's story.

"Right. She let me into the house and I called Randy. He brought some guys to help move it."

"Is this the same Randy who managed to drop my sculpture through the floor of the living room ten years ago?" Tony stopped walking and faced Pepper on the opposite side of the piano, the wall of windows to his back. " _That_ Randy?"

Pepper rolled her eyes at the clouds, "We keep him on retainer, Tony. We use him for everything, but you only ever seem to remember him for that one thing. And don't pretend you cared about that sculpture. You only bought it because that guy at the auction pissed you off. You outbid him purely out of spite."

Tony snorted and continued his circumnavigation of the grand piano, settling more comfortably into the conversation now that the initial shock of seeing his mother's long forgotten piano had become less unbalancing, "That is a blatant lie. I _love_ Greek art from the Classical Period."

"It was the Hellenistic Period," Pepper corrected flatly, "I would remember, I was the one who had to review the provenance and oversee the transaction and transport of a high end, multimillion, ancient Greek sculpture that you bought and immediately forgot about."

Tony hummed in begrudging agreement (because of course pepper was right. he hadn't even known what he'd bought at the time until it left a hole in the tile of his malibu home.) and completed his circuit back at Pepper's side. They stood in companionable silence, admiring the elegant build of the Steinway grand. In the back of his mind, the memories were a roaring cyclone of convoluted notes and choruses, blending together into a cacophony of noise that hurt to pick apart. So he did his best to ignore it.

"But seriously. Randy? He put a hole in our house."

Pepper practically choked, her blue eyes widening at him in disbelief. Neither of them paused to dwell on Tony's automatic use of the word _our_ when describing ownership of the Malibu home _,_ but Pepper had blinked when he said it. A misplaced, unnecessary blink that gave away the fact that she had noticed. "You want to compare your track records?"

Tony sighed, "Not really."

Pepper crossed her arms and lifted her head, pleased. "The point is, Randy's reliable. He respects our privacy. I like him. And so do you."

"Fine," Tony said breezily, mirroring Pepper's posture.

"Fine." Pepper stared straight ahead, the beginnings of a grin twitching in her cheeks, and their banter dwindled into more silence. Until she had to go and get an idea. "You should play something."

A chill brushed over the back of Tony's neck, "Play something?"

"Yeah, that's what you do with a piano, isn't it?" Pepper asked dryly, looking sideways at him. While her tone was easy and lighthearted, Tony knew that she understood that this was not a simple thing for him. The piano wasn't a family memento that represented all good things.

Tony drummed his fingers restlessly on his thigh, the prospect of putting his hands on the keyboard for the first time in years sending sparks on anxious energy into his fingertips. "It's been a long time. I don't even know if I can still do it."

Of course he could still do it. He never forgot how to do anything. He just didn't know if he wanted to.

Pepper seemed to get this, because she gently nudged him closer to the cushioned bench and pressed on his shoulders until he sat obediently. "Start with something happy."

 _Happy?_ "You're kidding, right?" Tony said.

"Come on, Tony," she urged him quietly, her eyes soft, loving. She sat down next to him and the old bench groaned softly under their combined weight. "Happy. It won't be as hard as you think, I promise."

Tony stared blankly at the keyboard and probed at the noise in his brain unenthusiastically, convinced that he would just dig up more repressed pain that he had packed away in some dusty, locked compartment of his mind years ago. It only took a few seconds for him to discover that he was wrong.

There was something - something he'd forgotten. Something _incredible._

Without thinking about it, Tony put his hands on the keys and played and suddenly he was back in the drawing room of his family's home, his father lounging on the sofa under the curtained windows with his legs crossed in a rare display of relaxation and an arm thrown over the top of the cushions, beating out the rhythm of the song as Tony played, **_smiling_** , his mother sitting to Tony's right on the bench, her voice clear and achingly beautiful as she sang along to the tune of _Let's Go Fly a Kite,_ adding her own instrumental flourishes to his melody. Tony and his mom broke off into a distracted fit of giggles when one of her fingers slipped and played a jarring flat in the middle one of the verses, and Howard chuckled behind them. Maria smiled warmly at him and swept on to the chorus, Tony joining his voice with her's.

And then he was in the solarium, and it wasn't his mother's voice, it was Pepper's, singing _Let's Go Fly a Kite_ to a horribly out of tune piano, laughing as she went because it didn't sound like it was supposed to. Her voice wasn't as stunning as Maria's had been, it was soft and unsure, but beautiful in its own way. Tony's hands danced confidently over the keys on their own, muscle memory overtaking his concentration. He didn't sing with her though. He wasn't ready to share that piece of himself and his mother with anybody just yet. It seemed sacred, like if he were to share it with somebody else that connection to her might fray into nothing.

So he listened to Pepper sing. The piano was an entire key off pitch, the notes twanging sourly with metallic undertones that crescendoed the longer he held them, and she could hardly get the words of the song out through her laughter, but it made Tony smile. An unforced smile, one with no strings attached and no purpose. Not because there was a camera or because he had to maintain appearances. Not because he had to lie. Just _because._

When song ended, the resolution wavered in the air, drawn out unsteadily by the damper pedal. Pepper laughed breathlessly next to him, her eyes crinkling. They made eye contact and held each other's gaze for a long, unbroken moment, and then Pepper cleared her throat and blinked away, patting out imaginary wrinkles from her skirt. "I, uh," she scooted off the bench and reached under the piano for her purse, rustling around inside as she straightened back to her feet. "I found these, too." She held out a small black case for him to take.

Tony undid the brass clasp and opened it to find his mother's old tuning set, the lever and rubber mutes nestled inside the custom-fitted velvet. A gift from Howard one Christmas decades ago. He could still remember the initial hot flash of shock he had felt when he'd watched her throw herself into his father's arms in a tight hug. His parents had never done that. The most public or personal display of affection he had ever seen between them was a chaste kiss on the cheek or quick touch of their hand to the other's back. That had been his favorite Christmas.

"I've got to dash," Pepper said, "The biomedical engineering department needs these signed permits by the end of the day so they can officially get started on the new tech going into the Bujumbura hospital. So I'll see you at the board meeting, when?"

Tony smiled briefly at her attempt to quiz him, "Tuesday."

"Knowing when it is and actually showing up are two very different things, Tony. Neither of which you're very good at."

"I'll be there, Pep," Tony promised, walking her to the door of the solarium. "These braces are going to change lives. I wouldn't miss something like that."

Pepper smiled at the floor and then at him, her eyes honest and full of azure fire, "I know you wouldn't." She adjusted the strap of her purse on her shoulder and pushed through the glass door, fishing for her phone in one of the zippered pockets of the handbag.

Tony watched her go, curling his fingers tighter around the hard, leather bound case in his hands. He wanted to call her back, he wanted to sit in the solarium with her and talk about nothing and everything and count how many times her eyes crinkled and listen to her laugh. She was at the end of the hall now. "Pepper!" he called to her back, taking a step forward. She turned towards him and Tony clacked his teeth together before he could say what he wanted to. "Thank you."

She waved at him in reply and then disappeared around the corner. Tony slapped the palm of his hand with the case and turned to look back at the piano in the front left corner of the solarium. He went back to it and deposited the tuning kit on the bench and slipped both hands underneath the lid, raising it until it rested on the highest prop. He slid the music rack off the piano to expose the tuning pins and set it aside. Tony sat down of the bench in front of the keyboard and removed the tuning wrench and rubber wedges from the case, scraping the seat forward so he could reach the pins. He'd done this with his mother a few times. She had taken expert care of this piano, tuning the whole thing if even one note sounded slightly flat. He could fix it for her.

He worked the mutes between the strings to isolate a single key and fitted the wrench around the pin, tapping out random rhythms with the corresponding key and using minute and exact movements in his wrist to twist the pin until the note rang true. Sorry FRIDAY, but electronic chromatic tuners could suck on his perfect pitch. Once Tony had his reference octave, the rest went relatively quickly. At least, it felt quick. But time seemed to do that when you were lost in your own head.

There were so many memories wrapped up in this piano, reverberating in the strings and echoing in the soundboard. And the more Tony thought about it, the more he sorted through the mess in his head and pulled apart all the noise, the more he found that most of them were good.

Like sitting shoulder to shoulder with his mother, late evening light filtering through the curtains as they played duets, elbowing each other when one of them messed up and throwing their hands up in the air with exasperation when a mistake was so unrecoverable that they couldn't justifiably keep going, while the other kept playing smugly like they'd won some sort of unspoken competition.

Or taking long naps on the sofa under a blanket when he'd been on vacation, falling asleep to Mozart and waking up hours later to his mother's strong, jazzy vocals as she sang her own variations of Billie Holiday.

Or singing with Rhodey on Christmas Eve, their Santa hats hanging drunkenly off their heads as they danced in place behind Maria as she played carols, his father watching on from his corner of the couch, heavy flakes of snow sifting down outside the window in the blackness of a wintry New York night.

But the memories weren't all good. He remembered that Christmas in 1991, his house undecorated and deathly silent. Rhodey had been at his parents' home in Philadelphia, but he had called earlier that day to wish him a Merry Christmas, even though they both knew that he had really been calling just to make sure that Tony would pick up. Having spent all of Christmas Eve with their own family, his Aunt Peggy and Jarvis had tried their best to fly to New York to be with him that day, only to be grounded in London due to the severity of the snowfall that season. So Tony had spent hours sitting at his mother's piano, trying to work up the courage to play something. The first note had fallen like ash and he gave up after that, drawing the fall board over the keys and finding company in his father's liquor cabinet.

He'd moved out of the house by the first of the year.

And in his effort to forget all the pain, he'd forgotten all the good, too.

 **XxX**

Based on the light inside the solarium, Tony had been sitting on the bench with one hand stuffed inside the piano and one hand awkwardly bent by his chest for hours by the time Natasha found him for dinner (dinner? really? he should seriously offer laura barton permanent residency at the compound). He didn't ask her how long she'd been watching him from the doorway and she didn't say anything about it, so they both pretended that she hadn't been there. But the ghost of a smile on her features as they walked to the communal kitchen was enough to tell Tony that Pepper had not been the sole mastermind behind his gift today.

Peter, Cooper, and Lila were sitting on one of the couches in the living area, steaming bowls of risotto in their laps and watching a cartoon movie with talking animals. Natasha bent over and scooped up Nathaniel from where he sat gurgling on the carpet, retrieving her own bowl from one of the side tables and sitting down next to Cooper. Rhodey was sitting on a stool at the bar in the kitchen and when Tony asked him how his coffee had tasted he flipped him off without wasting a glance up from his meal.

Laura was bustling in the kitchen, a clutter of used dishes stacked in the stainless steel sink. She was making chocolate chip cookies. Tony sidled up silently behind her back and peered over her shoulder as she rolled the dough into lumpy balls and placed them on a silicon cookie sheet. He reached around her, stole a ball of dough from the pan, and popped it in his mouth. With the lightning reflexes belonging only to a mother, Laura whipped around and smacked him with her wooden spoon.

"Lord!" Tony yelped, hopping away from her and rubbing at the red splotch of skin on the the underside of his forearm.

Laura brandished the spoon in front of his nose. "Don't touch my balls," she said evenly.

"Wording aside," Tony began, ducking away from her weapon, "nobody ever makes cookies around here. I make machines and Natasha makes pain. Why are you trying to deprive me of happiness?"

"Because they'll be better when they're done," she told him, turning back to the mixer.

"Better than the dough? I don't believe that." Tony grouched, attempting to sneak his hand through the open space between her elbow and the side of her torso, only to receive another warning blow to his knuckles. "Stop it!"

Laura chased him out of the kitchen at spoon-point and shoved a bowl of risotto into his hands. "If you eat your dinner then you can have dessert. Do I need to tell you how many bites you have to take?"

"No, Mom."

Laura smiled parentally and offered him a fork, which Tony took wordlessly before joining Rhodey at the granite counter. "T'Challa's leaving for Wakanda in an hour or so," Rhodey reminded him, sliding the napkin holder in his direction when he began shoveling risotto into his mouth. "I assume you'll want to talk to him before he goes."

"Where is he?" Tony asked. "Grooming?"

"The cat jokes got old the first time you made one," Natasha said from behind them, coming around to set her empty bowl on the lower counter.

"Wait until you hear this one," Tony told her, pulling his phone from the pocket of his jeans and setting it between him and Rhodey. "FRIDAY, kindly play His Highness' ringtone."

"This better not be - " Tony cut Natasha off with a finger and pointed to the phone proudly when the Purina MeowMix jingle blasted from the speakers. Tony smiled smugly when Rhodey coughed harshly on the rice in his mouth, his back heaving as he hacked and his eyes watering.

"Dude," Tony wrinkled his nose, leaning away from Rhodey as bits of rice spewed from his mouth and onto the counter. Gross. He stood from the barstool and slipped his phone back into his pocket. "I'm going to go find T'Challa. Laura, don't worry about the dishes. Vision will do them. He thinks it's relaxing."

FRIDAY located T'Challa in one of the conference rooms in the other wing of the compound. It was a late night leading into the weekend, so most of the staff would have gone home already, and that side of the complex was likely to be empty. If T'Challa was there, it was probably because he needed privacy from outside ears.

Having T'Challa on the team introduced a new dynamic. For the rest of them, living with a group of people who were very much outsiders from the rest of the world provided a somewhat normal and safe environment, a sense of belonging with a collection of kindred sprits who didn't seem to fit anywhere. A home, dysfunctional as hell and with an abnormal amount of explosions, but a home nonetheless. The Avengers needed each other, in an unspoken, desperate sort of way. They needed each other like the world needed them.

But T'Challa didn't. He had his own people, an entire kingdom that he belonged with. The team wasn't as much as a haven for him as it was for Peter or Natasha or Tony. He didn't hold himself above them, but he didn't need to be there. He was the king of a isolationist country. There would be things that he wouldn't share because the Avengers had no reason or right to know. He produced an element of uncertainty, a potentially unreliable variable in the equation. But T'Challa was a variable that Tony was glad to have. They were lucky to have him. They needed him, even if he didn't need them in the same way.

Tony stopped outside the conference room door, a fresh copy of the newly amended Accords in his hands. T'Challa was inside, sitting alone at the long glass table with his fingers steepled under his chin, eyes distant. The hallway outside was dark, the only light coming from the few inside the room.

"Trouble in paradise?" Tony asked, opening the door and tapping on the glass to get T'Challa's attention.

T'Challa snapped out of his head with an impressive calmness and smirked confidently, and Tony was reminded just how young this man actually was, "Nothing that my warriors and I cannot address. I will have to return to Wakanda tonight, however. You'll understand that the business and affairs of my country will remain private."

"Of course, but we could help."

"You could," T'Challa agreed, standing to face Tony, his voice firm but not abrasive, "But that won't be necessary."

In the months that Tony had known T'Challa, he had come to appreciate how uniquely brilliant he was. From the little that Tony understood about the kingdom of Wakanda (and he knew more than most), it was technologically advanced in a way that rivaled his own company and had a highly concentrated population of some of the brightest and most innovative minds in the world. T'Challa had no doubt received an education that was second to none, while also a master of political maneuvers. He was smart. If he said that he wouldn't need help, then Tony was inclined to believe him.

"Fair enough," he said agreeably and shrugged, lifting the Accords in T'Challa's direction, "But take this."

T'Challa made no move to take the document, "I already have a copy. I have no need for another one."

"I know _you_ don't need it. I'm talking about your company." Tony set the Accords on the table and stared silently at him, feeling dark ribbons of satisfaction ripple inside him as he watched T'Challa steadily lose control of his even-tempered composure. Tony knew where Steve and the others were, he'd known for months, and T'Challa was starting to realize that he'd been keeping a secret that was turning out to be no kind of secret at all.

"How long have you known?" T'Challa finally asked him, looking anywhere but Tony's eyes as he reached across the table to grab the Accords.

"It took me about four minutes to figure it out. But give yourself some credit, that's a long time to keep a secret from me." Tony said, a frigid spike of hurt driving itself through the base of his skull when he thought of the secret that Steve managed to successfully keep from him for two years. "I've had Julia include the original wording, but the amendments are in there too. They should be highlighted. Think about it as a before and after kind of thing. Like what they do on those home renovation shows."

T'Challa nodded in understanding and Tony filed that information away for future reference. The king of Wakanda watched MGTV and he was willing to bet all the money in his considerable fortune that it had been Rhodey who introduced him to it.

"Tony," T'Challa started, then he broke off and looked pained, like he couldn't find the right thing to say.

Tony only shrugged, "I get it. I'm glad, actually, it's one less thing for me to worry about knowing that they're somewhere safe."

"That may be so," T'Challa said, his voice gaining courage when he looked into Tony's eyes and not finding the anger that he had been expecting, "but I am sorry. It was not my intention to damage your trust any more than it already has been."

"So you know? About Barnes and Rogers."

"I was there."

And there was nothing more to say about that. Tony didn't want to talk about it, and T'Challa didn't press him. So he looked at the glass surface of the table, staring into his own dim reflection and feeling a tired flicker of relief when he recognized the face looking back at him better than he had in months. He heard the mind-shattering whine of temporary paralysis devices and felt the bite of Siberian air on his face and tasted the metallic heat of blood in his mouth. But it was all more distant now, less debilitating and more motivating. Empowering in a strange way.

A lie would keep you happy, but the truth could save your life. The trick was surviving it. And Tony had _survived._

 **XxX**

"He knows."

Steve looked around sharply when T'Challa dropped a thickly bound document on the wooden coffee table with enough force to rattle Wanda's forgotten teacup. Scott jumped so hard that his knee crashed into the underside of the table he, Wanda, and Sam were sitting at, which sent a cascade of Scrabble pieces flying through the air. A jumble of sheepish apologies flew out of his mouth and he crawled around on his hands and knees, sweeping the scattered tiles into his hand.

"Who knows what?" Sam demanded, standing from his chair and moving behind Steve's shoulder, his arms crossed defensively over his chest.

"Tony," Steve said slowly, wearily unsurprised when T'Challa looked back at him an even, unreadable look and nodded. "He knows that we're here. In Wakanda."

"Shit," Sam swore, and Steve could feel the electricity in the air, his muscles tightening instinctively in response. "How long do we have?"

T'Challa scowled at him, like he already knew exactly what Sam meant but was challenging him to say it out loud, "Until what?"

Sam rose to the challenge, much to Steve's dismay. He wanted this conversation to end before it went to far, before it went to a place where he wouldn't be able to control it. "Until Stark brings an army to come find us."

T'Challa laughed, cool and dangerous, and Steve almost took a step back, unprepared for the way that he had reacted. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Wanda fidgeting nervously on her feet, fingers twitching unconsciously. "Stark has known where you have been hiding since you first arrived here," T'Challa told them, and there was another clatter of ceramic on tile as Scott dropped his handfuls of Scrabble pieces. "Do you really believe that if he hasn't done something about it before, that he would do something now?"

"I don't know," Sam countered heatedly, stepping around Steve until he was facing T'Challa, who stood his ground confidently, completely unruffled in the face of his frustration. "Son of a bitch made me believe a lot of things that weren't true."

"Like what?"

"Like when he promised me that he would go help Steve. He came to me in the Raft, he asked me where they were, and he _promised_ me that he would go as a friend. And then Steve and Barnes come back beaten halfway to hell and missing more limbs than they started with. So if you think that you can trust anything that guy promises you, no matter how sincere he acts - "

"Sam," Steve whispered, petrified, feeling the conversation shudder and groan, so close to coming loose and spinning out of control.

" - then you need to pull your head out of your ass, your Highness," Sam finished, anger punctuating his words.

 _"Dude,"_ Scott breathed from behind them, sounding simultaneously in awe and completely terrified. "That's some off-with-your-head level shit right there."

T'Challa's eyes burned with obsidian flame, but his anger wasn't directed at Sam. "You haven't told them," he said, those flames searing, burning away the last of Steve's hope that he wouldn't be forced into this.

"No, I - " Steve swallowed, the silence from the others suffocating him. The room was filled with windows, the world of Wakanda just on the other side, but he felt trapped. Like the walls were pressing in on him. "I didn't know how."

"Tell us what?" Wanda asked softly, scared. And in that moment, Steve felt a brief surge of gratitude for her respect of the privacy of his mind, because it would be so easy for her to reach out and feel the panic and the regret. To experience what it felt like for him to have no idea what to do, how to tell them all the truth when the truth was so uncompromising and devastatingly blunt.

"Tony kept his promise, Sam," Steve croaked, finally, unable to look away from in black inferno of T'Challa's fathomless eyes. Or, unable to look at anybody else, not wanting to see the disappointment there.

"What are you talking about?" Sam asked him, unsure now. He stepped away from T'Challa, but not closer to Steve, just away. Distancing himself from the problem so he could see it better.

 _"If there's something you can't figure out, take step back. It's much harder to solve a problem when you're only focused on one variable. You need to see the functions, the operations, you need to see how it all fits together. The only way you'll be able to find what you're missing is if you take a step back and drink a two day old coffee because that's how fucking long I've been working on this,"_ Tony's voice pointed out in his head. He'd been in his lab at the tower, working on something far too complex and foreign for Steve to even begin to remember, when he'd said this. Steve remembered smiling when Tony had digressed into a passionate rant about coffee makers and common courtesy and "FRIDAY, remind me to look into micro-scale weaponry for Juliet" and inevitably forgotten that he was there.

"I'm talking about Zemo," Steve carried on, the voice in his head dying out and reminding him of a friendship that didn't exist anymore, and might never would. "His plan. The UN bombing, winding the Winter Soldier up and setting him loose in Berlin, everything. It all culminated in getting us there and turning us against each other."

"Zemo? The guy that T'Challa got for Ross? How the hell did he manage to turn you against each other more than what the Accords had already done? I mean," Sam heaved a grunt of air through his nose in incredulity, "Barnes lost an arm. You lost your _shield._ What the hell _happened?"_

"The Winter Soldier killed Tony's parents," he admitted forcefully in a moment of choked courage, looking away from T'Challa, unable to bear being scrutinized by those eyes any longer.

An entire universe could've fit in the silence that followed.

"What? No," Scott laughed disbelievingly, leaning with both hands against the back of the couch. "Everybody knows that Howard Stark had probably been drunk off his ass when he and his wife got in that car. The man was a functioning alcoholic. Besides, the investigation found no evidence of foul play. Officially, it was just a crash. Nothing special about it."

"There was a video," Steve assured them all numbly. It had been playing on a self continuous loop in his head for months. "It was Bucky."

"Damn," Scott murmured, pushing himself off the couch and running a hand through his hair, "And he didn't know?"

"He didn't," Steve said, wrestling the words past the lump of pain that was sitting on his chest. "But I did."

He didn't know why he chose to look at them now, after he had just confessed to keeping a secret that he had no right to keep from, and directly impacting the life of, one of his closest friends. Maybe because he knew that he deserved to see it.

Scott was the least disappointed out of all of them, perhaps because he knew him the least. The only thing damaged in his perspective was Steve's reputation. But Wanda? Wanda had been devoted to him. To see some of that faith crack in her wide eyes, and to know that it was _him_ who might as well have reached out and crushed it in his own hands, it was almost enough to crumble the last of his resolve. Sam was the worst. Staring silently and with perfect stoicism, refusing to look away, like he was simultaneously praying that it wasn't true and daring Steve to try and make an excuse. He wasn't angry, just disappointed - in the deepest and most miserable sense of the word.

"Were you going to tell us?"

They all turned towards Clint, who had been so silent and invisible throughout the entire conversation that Steve had forgotten he was there. He was sitting on a chair in the far corner by the windows, leaning on his elbows that he had braced against his knees, shoulders slightly hunched towards his ears and hands clasped in front go him. He looked at Steve with resigned curiosity.

"It wasn't my story to tell," Steve managed, because he didn't _know_ if he ever would've told them. He wished that he did, he wished that he could say _yes, of course, no more secrets._ He wished for so many things.

"Bull _shit_ it wasn't," Clint growled in frustration, pushing himself up from his chair but making no move to come any closer. "You made it your story to tell when you decided that Tony shouldn't hear it. You made it your story to tell when you became a part of it." There was more silence, constricting and charged with emotion. Then, "I'm leaving," Clint announced simply and without warning.

"What?" Wanda's voice wavered as she took a faltering step in his direction, so torn and lost.

"I have a family. They need me. And I said some things to Tony that he didn't deserve, some really terrible things. I'd like to try and fix that. I made the call to Fury last night. I'm going back," he explained. He looked to Wanda regretfully, "You could come with me," he suggested without any real optimism, because he knew what her answer would be.

Wanda shook her head quickly, her hand coming up to rub the corner of her eye. "I don't think I'm ready. Even if I signed the Accords, there is something," she paused, straining for the right word, " _broken_ between Stark and I. Both of our faults, I think. But I'm not ready to fix it yet, and I don't think he is either. There is a lot of fear between us, and fear is a hard thing to fix."

Clint smiled tightly and nodded at her, "Then come help me pack. Me and my two outfits and toothbrush."

They left together, and neither one of them looked back. And as much as it hurt, Steve wasn't surprised that Clint had decided to go back. When he had first rescued them all from the Raft, Clint had been fuming, the very air he touched seemed to boil with fury. But the more distance they put between their borrowed jet and that floating monstrosity of a prison, the more that unbridled, blistering anger settled into something less volatile and destructive. Over the past months they'd spent sitting and thinking and regretting in Wakanda, Steve had watched Clint become more subdued, had watched his eyes become more open and less flinty whenever they saw Tony on TV, and had caught him folding and unfolding a faded photograph of his family mindlessly, the paper worn with creases.

Scott glanced soundlessly between Steve, Sam, and T'Challa and then coughed, looking morbidly awkward. "I'm just gonna," he trailed off, pointing at the door and trotting nervously out of the room.

More silence. He remembered the silence in that bunker in Siberia, the screen dissolving into black and white static and then black, like at the end of a movie. Except it hadn't been a movie. It had been real. And agonizing and so irreparable. He remembered watching Tony, his breathing bound in his chest, cold and bitter. He remembered that silence, filled with so much pain and it infected everything, sunk into every crevice and stole all the hope in Steve's heart.

"Sam," Steve began, his voice low and entreating. _Please don't leave me. I've lost so many people in my life._ ** _Everybody._** _Please, not you too._

Sam shook his head slowly at the ground, "You let me believe that he was a lying bastard, that he would cheat and sweet talk his way into getting what he wanted. But this whole time, he's just been hurt. And you did that," he said, lifting his head and staring straight into Steve's eyes. "You were wrong to do that to him." Sam reached deliberately for the copy of the Accords that T'Challa had left on the coffee table, and he thumbed the binding thoughtfully. "It makes me wonder how much you've been wrong about."

Steve watched numbly as he nodded apologetically at T'Challa and started for the door. But before he left, he stopped and glanced back at Steve, his eyes softer and more understanding. "You don't have to tell me what happened after he found out, I think I can figure that part out on my own. Barnes is your friend. But the thing is, Tony was your friend, too. I saw it in his eyes at the Raft. You had a friendship that few people are able to have. And I don't think that it's as irrecoverable as you might think."

When he disappeared, Steve's legs folded underneath him and he collapsed onto the couch, bowing his head and feeling the tremors run through his shoulders. He had nothing left to hide now, and it should've felt liberating. Instead, he just felt hollow exhaustion.

"They needed to know, Captain," T'Challa said.

Steve closed his eyes and breathed, "I know."

The cushions dipped next to him as T'Challa sat down. "I do not believe that Sam was wrong."

A guttural and sudden sound burst from Steve's lips, halfway between a laugh and a sob. "We watched the hearing, you know. He looked like a ghost had spit in his face when they asked him about Bucky." He remembered waiting breathlessly for Tony's reply, a sinking feeling in his chest when it seemed to take him longer than usual to process the question. He remembered his guilty feeling of relief when Tony had finally answered, the words a little robotic and terse, though the rest of the world probably had been fooled by his expertly performative response.

 _He deserves our help._

T'Challa said nothing for a length before speaking again. "I have never met a man who is made of as many contradictions as Tony Stark. There is a constant battle inside him between logic and emotion. You all think that his mind is the only thing that drives him - but you are wrong. He fights with his mind, but he makes decisions with his heart. You and he are not as different as you might think, Captain. You both let your hearts guide you. And I believe that the only reason that you disagree with each other as much as you have is simply because your hearts have been hurt by different things. A heart can heal, it just needs time."

And Steve supposed that maybe there never was or would be a hero who's heart had never been broken.

 **XxX**

Since he'd left, Steve hadn't wanted to go back. He hadn't wanted to face the disappointment and pain that he'd caused. He hadn't wanted to see the destructive path that he'd carved through the lives of his friends in his effort to protect his oldest friend.

But for the first time in months, Steve wanted to go home. He wanted to stop hiding. He wanted to stop existing in an endless state of guilt and remorse. He wanted to be a part of that life again and feel the weight of purpose on his shoulders, shared equally by the rest of the team. He wanted to _do_ something. He wanted to apologize to Tony over and over until he had no more breath to scream the words _._

 **XxX**

 **Steve: Why did you go back?**

 **Natasha: You know why I went back.**

 **Steve: Alright, but besides the Accords.**

 **Natasha: You know that too.**

 **XxX**

 **Natasha: Okay. Do you remember that time you found Tony unconscious in his lab? He'll never accept it, but he passed out from dehydration. He'd spent three entire days shut up in there working on upgrades to the team's gear. Nobody saw him for days, but nobody really thought to notice because that's Tony right? He doesn't understand the concept of sleep or the delegation of projects, and he sometimes forgets that he needs food to live when he's working. Stark operates under the self-detrimental assumption that he can do everything by himself. And the thing is, he can. But he shouldn't have to.**

 **Natasha: I want to be better. I want to notice. That's why I went back.**

 **XxX**

 **A huge thank you and lots of love to all of those who have commented, favorited, or followed this story. Your support and interest is what keeps me writing.**

 **mr-stank :)**


	9. Chapter 9

**so.. i posted this chapter about a month ago on ao3 and just... forgot... about doing it here too. Hopefully this will make up for such an extremely delayed update.**

 **Chapter Nine**

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, hey," Tony waved his hands wildly from the edge of the simulation arena, "FRIDAY, pause the program for a minute will you? Peter! Did you see what happened there?"

Peter sailed to the floor and landed in an agile crouch, a wispy trail of webbing falling languidly through the air behind him. He toed the mat with his foot sheepishly, head hanging at an angle that effectively kept them from making eye contact, "I left Natasha and she got swarmed. It was my bad."

 _"My bad_ doesn't get Nat out of the hospital," Tony said reproachfully, pointing firmly to where Natasha stood breathing heavily in the center of the room, hair sticking in sweaty curls to her forehead. The simulation drones that surrounded her on all sides broke into their pixelated foundations, tiny cubes of holographic light draining silently to the floor like geometric raindrops. _"My bad_ doesn't bring a teammate or civilians back from the dead. _My bad_ doesn't cut it for us. So. What happened? Start from the beginning."

At some point while he'd been speaking, Peter had swept the red and blue mask from his head, his brown hair in total chaos, his cheeks cherry red with heat, and his eyes wide as he listened to Tony. He had snapped to perfect attention, becoming sober as the magnitude of his responsibilities sunk in. "I saw Natasha getting overwhelmed and I dropped in to try and get some of those guys off her back," he explained, twisting the fabric of his mask in his hands and Tony reminded himself to be gentler with him. "When I thought she was clear, I pulled out to get some height and went off to go help Vision. I shouldn't have left her."

"You can leave her," Tony told him, nodding in Natasha's direction as she settled a distance behind Peter's shoulder. "She's terrifyingly capable of handling herself. But you have to make sure that if you do leave her alone, you aren't leaving her with bigger problems. When you pulled out of Natasha's zone just now it left a vacuum, and that space got filled with more bad guys than she started with.

"You helped her out from under a pile of shit at the beginning, but when you left before the entire area was clear, you heaped an even bigger load of shit on her. You have to clear more than just what the problem is at that moment. You have to look at what comes next. You gotta be three, five, _ten_ steps ahead. A battle is much more than just you and the guy you're fighting, it's about all the other guys and how they'll react to what you do. It's a dynamic system," and Tony saw a switch click into place behind Peter's eyes and he smiled to himself. A familiar smile that Tony recognized because he did it, too, whenever he'd figured something out. "There are moving pieces and you have to be able to anticipate how they'll react to stress. Got it?"

Peter pulled his mask back down and rolled his shoulders in anticipation, "Dynamic system. Got it."

Tony backed off the edge of the simulator mat, "FRIDAY, let's run scenario four beta one one. You've got full control over variable manipulation and system preferences."

"Yes, Boss," the voice of his AI responded eagerly, the holographic pixels blinking into the outline of the practice drones, overlaid by the artificial reality filter until the digital metal plates of the enemy bots gleamed in the light of the sun streaming through the skylights two stories above them. The drones were equipped with advanced haptic interface technology, so by the time FRIDAY finished constructing the new situational environment, the team would be facing off against enemies that could hit and hurt. Within appropriate boundaries.

He watched Peter, Natasha, and Vision regroup as the sim ran through the start-up sequence and then they shifted seamlessly into action when the virtual battle began. They had started training together only this week, and it had been rough going the first handful of practice runs. Peter was accustomed to working solo, and filing down his fighting habits so they would fit with the team's took some doing. Plus, he was young and impulsive. But he was also easily coachable and a committed learner, and it hadn't taken too long before the others adapted to incorporate him into their ranks. It was a worthwhile progression, and the entire team was stronger because of him.

He continued observing for another minute or two, mentally celebrating when he watched as Peter flipped over Natasha's head and disabled a drone behind her turned back and continued to shut down two more approaching enemies still some distance away, using his webs to lash them together and fling them across the room into a pack of bots crawling over Vision.

Tony smiled to himself and trotted away from the simulator back to where he'd abandoned Rhodey. He was standing in the bottom half of the War Machine armor, looking more happy than Tony had seen him in months. Rhodey tossed Tony's tablet to him as he came closer, nodding to the practice session, "Kid's getting good."

"Yeah, yeah," Tony agreed, his attention focused on the coupling system displayed on the tablet, but he smiled softly as he heard Peter whooping behind him. "I like him. Okay, let's finish up calibrating your braces to the armor and then we can suit up and go for a test drive."

Rhodey beamed at him, "Hell yes."

Tony set about pairing the two devices, reading instant feedback data as it popped up on his screen and making tiny adjustments to the electrical signatures of both instruments until they became compatible. "Alright, let's see how this works," he murmured distractedly, tapping on the screen to finalize the system default inputs.

He looked up as he digitally sent the calibration settings into the War Machine armor, watching with satisfaction when little circles of light glowed with a positive green color at the joints in the legs as the suit accepted the braces. "Coupling process successful, Boss," FRIDAY informed him, "Saving system settings."

Tony tossed the tablet aside and spread his hands triumphantly, "Run a quick diagnostics check."

Rhodey arched an eyebrow, "You think it might not work?"

"Of course it'll work," Tony assured him, crossing his arms in front of his chest and trying not to remember the black hole that had opened up in his stomach when he'd watched his best friend fall out of the sky. "I built this to work, so it'll work. But I'm not taking any chances. I've also included a few other safety measures in your armor's system functions. For example, if something happens to the calibration of your braces and the armor, FRIDAY will be able to take over remotely and pilot you to the ground. Or if the arc reactor becomes non-operational the suit will eject you and deploy a built-in parachute."

Rhodey tried for a smile but it fell short, becoming something more of a grimace. His gaze trailed to the floor and Tony watched him go silent, his heart constricting in his chest because he didn't know what to do or what else to fix. But when Rhodey looked back up at him, his eyes were guilty. "How long have you been thinking about this?"

The gears in Tony's head crunched together with a screech of metal grinding on metal and stopped working for a beat. He shook his head and squinted at Rhodey, "What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about _you_ ," Rhodey said quietly, but with intensity, his eyes searching Tony's face. "You've built all this stuff into my suit, stuff that'll make sure what happened won't happen again. You've obviously been thinking about it, but, Tony, I know you, you're swamped, you're working too hard and too fast and I get it. I know why," the words came out quick and sudden, in the uncontrolled and passionate way of a concerned friend. Rhodey lifted his arms slightly and opened and closed his hands, like he wanted to do something with them but wasn't sure he could. Finally, he sighed tiredly, "I know why. And I know that I can't get you to stop, but I don't want my problems to get in the way of more important things."

"There's nothing more important than this," Tony told him simply, wondering why he even had to say it.

Rhodey chuffed quietly through his nose and glanced away, smiling in a pained kind of way and looking for all the world like he'd just lost an argument. "Yeah, but _what about you?"_

Tony was really starting to hate this conversation. It didn't make sense. What about him? There were more important things to do than worry about himself. Like protecting his friends. And his team. And his company. And the world. He didn't really have time for anything else.

"You've got visitors, Boss," FRIDAY's voice interrupted, "Observation deck."

They craned their necks upward and searched the balcony against the glare of the morning sun through the skylights. "Who is it, Fri?"

"Hank Pym and Hope van Dyne."

Tony deflated into himself, groaning plaintively, and dropped his head until his chin nearly bumped against his chest. "Why?" he whined. "I don't like them, they don't like me. Why are they here?"

"Maybe you should go ask them," FRIDAY suggested, and her tone made it impossible to tell if she was being helpful or cheeky, but Tony was willing to bet on the latter.

"Wow," Rhodey mused, his gaze roving from the two figures above them back to Tony. "How long's it been?"

Tony hummed in thought. "Not since before dad died. And Pym's mistrust of him kind of just translated to me. Completely unwarranted."

"Uh-huh," Rhodey scoffed, rolling his eyes so dramatically Tony thought he'd lose them inside his brain, "I'm sure it had nothing to do with you and your whole _'oh look at me I'm 22 and I'm already richer than you and I can get more action in one night than you can get in a decade'_ vibe."

Tony physically turned himself towards Rhodey, thrusting his head forward slightly like he'd misheard, lips parted in a moment of bafflement. "If those words ever came out of my mouth - they would've been completely accurate, by the way - but if I did actually say that, it's because I was drunk."

Rhodey smirked impishly, raising his hands in surrender and shaking his head innocently. Tony frowned at him before shuffling away. "And don't say _vibe,"_ he carped irritably, "Your 80s is showing again."

Tony trudged slowly up the stairs to the observation balcony, mentally chanting _shit shit shit_ to the beat of feet falling on the steps. His family's history of relationships with Hank Pym had been toxic at best, and completely nuclear at worst. But he and Tony had eventually reached a place where they mutually ignored each other's existence, so the fact that he was willing enough to initiate contact sent Tony reeling into a defensive mode. Pym wanted something. And Tony had spent his entire life surrounded by people who wanted something, he knew to be wary of them.

"Pym," Tony greeted curtly as he approached them.

Hank Pym swiveled to face him, his eyes guarded and deliberately civil, "Stark."

Tony tilted his head to gaze around Pym at his daughter who had yet to show any acknowledgment of his presence. She was standing straight-backed with her hips squared confidently to the railing of the edge of the balcony, her face tilted downward as she watched the team drill on the floor below, her hair shielding her eyes like black walls.

"Hey, Princess," Tony waved at her shoulder, resurrecting the childhood nickname that he'd made for her years and years ago. Pym and Hope would come by the house, sometimes while Tony was home from school. Hank would disappear to his father's lab (where world war 3 would eventually break out if he stayed longer than four hours) and Hope would perch on the sofa in their living room, reading a new book every time and having Jarvis shuttle her cups of tea. She was, like, six at the time. In a spark of annoyance, Tony had dubbed her Princess of the Stark Estate.

The nickname got her attention and she lifted her head to face Tony, folding her arms against her chest and smiling like she was figuring out the most efficient way to kill him.

"Great," Tony hissed under his breath, instantly regretting his immediate reflex to antagonize her. He cleared his throat, "What are you doing here, Pym?"

Hank clasped his hands behind his back, a sleek black briefcase hanging from one of his fists. He smiled, his eyes remaining calculatedly cool, "We're here to talk."

Talk.

Tony could think of about 42 other things he'd rather do with Hank Pym and Hope van Dyne. 14 of those things included fire, three of them ended with him jumping from the balcony, 25 had him most likely facing a law suit of some kind, and all of them would be less painful than this. "Fine," he consented with a smile, gesturing with one arm behind him where a hallway would lead them to the common area.

Hank strode at his side and Hope trailed a short distance behind them. Tony's neck prickled under her frosty stare. Only half a minute into this meeting and he already wanted to light himself on fire.

"Congratulations, by the way," Hank began, his voice neutral. "The technology world is raving about your company's new product. Stark Industries' step forward in biomechatronics is revolutionary. Very impressive."

"Thank you," Tony returned in his own emotionless, insincere tone. "And let's just agree right now to not waste each other's time. Starting with you admitting that you're not impressed, you're just pissed that I got there before Pym Technologies."

Hank shrugged, unperturbed, "I can admit that. But that's not why I'm here."

"Why are you here then?" The glass doors of the conference side of the common area sliced open as they approached and Tony led them to the same table where Ross had confronted the team with the Accords only a few months ago. None of them sat down, and Tony figured that was appropriate. "It's definitely not to talk business. Oh, maybe because you want to ream me out for making your friend, Scott Lang, an international fugitive. And if that's the case, I'll just have to ask you to make an appointment like everybody else. I'm backed up until the year 2020."

They took up positions on different sides of the table, Tony standing on one and Hank and Hope squared up against him on the opposite side. To his credit, Pym didn't let Tony's coarseness ruffle him, "That's not why we're here either. I gave Scott the Ant Man suit because I thought that he could do good with it. I thought maybe that it could help him turn his life around. But I don't appreciate that suit being used to help him become a war criminal. It puts a bad name on me and my company."

Hope looked up from where she'd been occupied inspecting her already immaculate fingernails, "Pym Technologies released an official statement in May denouncing his actions and denying our involvement or support of him or Steve Rogers. We had no idea what he was up to until it was all over the news."

"Whatever the hell that kid did when he was wearing my suit, whatever mess Scott Lang is in right now, it's his own damn fault as far as I'm concerned," Pym declared, shoving his hands into his pockets and rocking comfortably on the balls of his feet.

Tony knew better than to be fooled by his flippancy. "You miss him."

Pym sighed, his face twisting in a scowl of acceptance, "Unfortunately."

"And you," Tony grinned at Hope, "You like him."

"Unfortunately," Hank repeated.

Hope rolled her neck so she was glaring up at the ceiling and shook her head in bored, irritated sort of way that told Tony that this conversation was a dinner-table regular. "Dad, enough."

" _O-_ kay," Tony raised his hands in a halting motion, cutting off Pym's reply as it sat on his lips. "Let's get back to the part where you tell me why you're here. I'm not in the mood to play family therapist."

Hank glared at him, his eyebrows drawing low over his now smoldering eyes, "Are you ever in the right mood, Stark?"

"I don't know. Are you ever nice?"

"No. Are you?"

"Oh, dear God," Hope snapped, taking the briefcase from her father's grip and slamming it onto the glass table. "We're here because I signed the damn Accords."

Tony froze halfway through his next retort to Hank. "Uh, what?" he asked intelligently.

Hope flicked open the locks on the case and removed a copy of the revised edition of the Accords, sliding it across the table for Tony to take. "I signed them. I want to be on the team."

Tony felt his face do something distasteful and completely reflexive. He gave Pym a look across the table, tapping a finger on the cover of the document in front of him. "You want to me," he started slowly, pointing at his own chest, "to babysit your daughter?" he finished incredulously, twisting his hand around so he was pointing to Hope who was in turn glaring, like it was her most basic function.

Hank smacked his lips and looked over his glasses at him, unimpressed, "Something tells me that it'll be the other way around."

"Right. And what makes you think that we need you?" he turned his attention to Hope, challenging. The last thing he wanted on this team that he'd just barely gotten out of the mud was the volatile daughter of the man who wanted to roast his intestines on a stick.

But he thought of the sleepless nights he'd spent the last week laying the foundation for POLARIS. He thought of the dream that haunted him even when he wasn't thinking about it, with a curse he was born with and glowing stones, a hostile universe and merciless laughter. Glass he couldn't break.

"Cut the crap, Stark," Pym fumed from his side of the table. "Half of your team is in the wind, you're building up from the ground. You want Hope on your side."

"Do I?" Tony choked the question out in a doubtful kind of way, with a side order of legitimate fear. "Because she looks like she could kill me in my sleep with a smile on her face."

"Listen," Hank elaborated hotly, placing both palms flat on the table and leaning forward, "you made an incredible mess of the Avengers, Stark."

Tony stood his ground, true anger shooting through him like an anchor. Anger that was partially the product of the knowledge that Pym was right. "I did what I could to keep us together."

Hank scowled, "You could've done better."

Tony spread his hands, letting his words bounce off of him harmlessly. "You're preaching to the choir, Pym. I can always do better. I'm in the business of doing better. You and I both are. But you're right, I made mistakes. I put too much trust in people who didn't deserve it."

"Ross?" Hope asked.

Tony nodded, "Ross."

"That's another thing," Pym swung back into the debate, jabbing an accusing finger at Tony's chest. "I'm not going to have my daughter be under the thumb of a man like that."

"We're not under anybody's thumb," Tony grit out, stunned that he was reliving this argument in the same room where the first one took place.

"Really?" Hank laughed condescendingly, "Well, you could've fooled me."

Tony's nerves felt like they were on fire, he wanted to put his fist through this table and feel the shards rip into his palm. He wanted to feel something other than anger. "If you've read the Accords then you would understand that that's not true," he retorted, ironing his voice into something low and even. "They call for accountability, not submission. And if that distinction is too hard for you to make, then you shouldn't be here. Besides, I'm not an idiot. I've known Ross for years. He's corrupt and he's good at it and I'm always looking for ways to prove it."

Hank was silent for a second, the lines in his face smoothing out as he calmed a fraction. He straightened from his aggressive position stretching towards Tony across the table. He twisted his jaw thoughtfully, "It's a good speech, Stark. Do you mean it?"

"I guess you'll just have to trust me."

"I trust you."

If the joints in their necks were made of metal, then they would've screeched and shattered with the speed and force at which Tony and Hank both snapped their heads in their hurry to look at Hope.

Pym opened and closed his mouth like a fish on dry land, trying to find the words to reach his daughter. He finally decided on: "What?"

"I do," Hope repeated strongly, her gaze fastening tightly on Tony. "He acts like an infant and I don't really like him, but I trust him to do the right thing by me and the world."

Tony looked back and forth between Pym and Hope as the silence stretched on and on. Finally, after an indeterminate and painfully uncomfortable amount of time, Hank nodded once. "Okay," he said, reaching to refasten the locks on his briefcase. He stood back and swept both of them with a careful gaze which lingered on Tony long enough to turn into something very close to lethal. Then he left.

Hope and Tony stared at each other wordlessly and the air conditioning cycled to life, interrupting the silence. Tony's feet twitched in his shoes and he bounced back and forth on his toes, tapping a random rhythm on his leg through the pocket of his pants. Hope stared.

"Welcome to the Avengers, Princess," Tony broke the silence bluntly, pulling a plate of Laura Barton's leftover chocolate chip cookies across the table and offering them to Hope. "Cookie?"

 **XxX**

Tony relocated to the tower that night, seeking refuge from Hope van Dyne and her imperious attitude and her ruler-straight hair, with corners sharp enough to puncture a lung.

He didn't have an excuse for why he ended up at the bar though. It was just one of those days. The kind where he gave up because he was tired and sometimes he liked to sit in the dark with a bottle and not think about anything in particular, fascinated by the feeling of the cogs and belts in his head slowing into something more tolerable, not the usual blistering heat and noise of machinery pounding through information at a thousand miles per hour.

It was relaxing, or at least, it was for about 15 minutes. Then Nicholas Fury invited himself to the party, sitting down with hard finality on the stool next to Tony without announcement or ceremony.

"Jesus!" he yelped, bracing himself against the countertop with one hand and dropping his head between his shoulders. Once he got his heart rate back under control, he glared at the man next to him. "You know, there's a doorbell."

"I know," Fury agreed, fixing him under his one-eyed gaze. "And I don't trust it."

They spent a moment staring at each other in perfect silence. "I don't even know what that's supposed to mean," Tony said finally, going innocently back to his drink.

"Oh, I think you do," Fury said, and Tony smirked into the bottom of his glass as it hid his face. "You still owe SHIELD half a million dollars in damage fees."

Tony wagged a finger at him, munching on a cube of ice, "SHIELD doesn't exist anymore, so technically I don't owe it anything."

Fury heaved one of his weary, _what did I do to deserve this?_ sighs reserved exclusively for Tony, "You and your goddamn technicalities." He reached blindly under the counter for the bottle of scotch that Tony had used to fill his tumbler and grasped it by the neck, drawing it closer to him.

Tony wordlessly slid him a crystal tumbler and watched dimly as Fury raised his eyebrows at the bottle in his hand. "I know when people fall off the wagon they fall hard, but Stark, this is _hard,_ even for you."

"Give me some credit," Tony mumbled into his glass, "I'm not getting drunk."

Fury brandished the bottle, amber liquid sloshing against the glass frame inside, "You could take a whiff of this and be seeing double for the next three days."

Tony snorted humorlessly and looked sideways at him, "That's because you're not me. It must be genetic or something. And I'm _not_ getting drunk. It's not fun anymore. It's a temporary fix with even bigger problems in the morning. And it comes with a complimentary headache."

Fury leaned forward, the leather of his trench coat squeaking softly underneath him, his face pinched into an intense scowl and his eye narrowed into a fierce squint.

Tony set his tumbler down and rubbed a hand over his face, "Please stop," he muttered, his voice muffled by his fingers, "It hurts just to watch you."

Fury tilted his head at him inquisitively, "Are you dying?"

"I hope not."

Fury stared at him for a while longer and Tony eventually got the uncomfortable feeling like he was a particularly intriguing museum exhibit. "What do you need, Nick?"

Fury sat back, propping an elbow up on the counter and putting his chin in his hand. "Who says I need anything?"

Tony smiled and it felt brittle, like old plastic, "Somebody always needs something."

"I'm here because I know all about the shit that you've been wading through these past few months. I know you, Stark, better than most. You say you're fine when you're not. And you've been trying to convince the world that you're fine for a while now. And I'm not your damn therapist, but I do care. I've known you since I got put on a SHIELD security detail tasked with following your family around back in the day, ever since you were just a tiny little shit. Now you're a bigger little shit and I still, for some reason, care about you."

Tony rolled his eyes, "And?"

"And," Fury looked away for the first time, his voice becoming more serious, guilty, even. "I need your help."

"Yeah?" Tony asked resignedly, scratching at his cheek. "My help with what?"

"Barton's coming back."

"Huh," Tony grunted, absorbing that information, not entirely surprised, but not excited about it either. Last time he'd seen Clint, the guy had had the audacity to attack him with Rhodey's injury and Tony couldn't just let that slide by. Maybe it was pettiness, maybe it wasn't. But whatever it was, Tony knew that he _had_ to let it slide. This whole thing was an exercise in forgiveness, and every moment of it took more and more out of him, yet he continued to come back stronger than before. "You want me to talk to the UN, make him a deal."

Fury nodded.

Tony fingered the rim of his tumbler, suddenly losing his taste for the scotch, "When's the deadline?"

"Well," Fury pulled a slim phone from one of the deep pockets in his coat and passed it casually from hand to hand without really doing anything with it, "I have Barton set up in an old safehouse in Morocco until the end of this week, then he's moving to Mumbai, and Barcelona after that. I'm hoping to put a couple thousand travel miles between him and Wakanda. I think a month should be long enough to get word to the UN that Clint Barton's looking to make a deal and do some political string-pulling to get him back."

Tony dipped his head in understanding, tilting his glass to Fury, "So Barton's going to bounce around the globe until I can get a contract finalized and when the UN starts to get curious after he pops back into society, there'll be a pretty long trail leading to nowhere special. Assuming they don't look back far enough."

"Barton's going underground, I'm assuming that they won't be able to track him at all."

Tony snorted, smiling at Fury's confidence in his ability to hide somebody. "You're not that good."

"No, no, I am," Fury countered knowingly, leaning closer to Tony, "You're just better at finding people than anybody I know. _You_ might be able to track Barton, but the UN doesn't have your brains or resources. They won't be able to. And even if they can, their investigators won't be able to follow a trail back far enough to find anything that matters."

Tony murmured his agreement, rolling the tumbler in lazy circles on the bar. "What have you been up to, Nick?"

"Oh, you know," Fury exhaled loudly, taking an enthusiastic gulp of scotch, "Taking down Hydra offshoot groups. Hydra had a far reach and they influenced a lot of people. Some of them are cheap knockoffs, but others have real potential to be serious threats. What do you think, should I recruit Cap? He's probably losing his head with nothing to do. You know how he is."

"Yeah," Tony drawled slowly, taking another sip of his drink just so he had something to do. "I know how he is. You can ask Rogers to do whatever the hell you want, you don't need my approval. I don't really care about what he's doing as long as it's not making more problems for me."

Fury's mouth twisted but he said nothing, downed the rest of his glass, and made to leave. But as he stood, Tony found himself once again the the spotlight of his perceptive gaze. "You know, not every problem is one that you have to solve. Cap gets caught? Maybe that should be on him. His choices, his responsibility. Have you ever thought of that? You don't have to fix everything. Some things are meant to be broken so others can figure out how to fix them."

"Really?" Tony turned on his stool so he could face Fury in a moment of honesty. "Because I don't trust other people to fix things when I know that I can do it better. Do you?"

"I trust you."

Tony stared blankly, "You trust me?"

Fury tilted his head in thought. "Don't actively distrust," he amended.

"That's better."

Fury chuckled and started to stroll away, but he left Tony with one final thought. "Maybe not everything is your fault, Stark."

And then he was gone, leaving Tony as he started. Alone in the dark with a bottle of scotch, the gears in his head punching back into rhythm, filling his head with fire and the smell of burning.

 **XxX**

September 3 and Clint is back, haggard looking and tired, but he's back.

It was a tension filled moment when Clint pulled up to the United Nations building in a nondescript taxi. The ten man security detail flanked the car, weapons at the ready, and Tony stood in his suit at the center of the courtyard. Natasha vibrated with anxiety at his shoulder, playing unconsciously with the holster strap of her sidearm. Behind them, Everett Ross, Alan Sabbe, and Secretary Ross were waiting at a safe distance with a small escort team.

Tony had tried to convince them that their security efforts were a waste of time and energy, worried that a nervous tick might be misinterpreted and the situation would escalate into something unnecessarily violent. But the UN had assured him that their safety protocols were simply precautionary measures, not that Tony could entirely blame them. Only four months ago, Clint had been part of the faction of the Avengers that had gone rogue. They didn't know what to expect.

But Clint stepped out of the backseat with his arms raised calmly, and Tony and Natasha moved forward to greet him. One of the security detail removed a pair of cuffs from a pocket in his tactical vest, but backed off pretty quickly when the glowing blue eyes of Tony's helmet locked onto him ominously.

"Clint," Natasha smiled, but only Tony knew how nervous she was beneath her smooth exterior. She wanted this to go right, she _needed_ this to go right.

"Hey, Nat," Clint grinned back at her, slowly lowering his hands back to his sides as the security detail relaxed around them. His smile grew tighter when he looked to Tony, not with anger but with something deeper and less hostile. He pushed through it and extended his hand, "Hey, Tony."

A pulse of warmth blossomed in his chest, reluctantly at first, then stronger, and some of the tension eased out of his muscles. Tony's helmet clicked apart and folded down into the suit and he smiled, reaching out to shake his hand. "Hey, Clint."

"So, uh," Clint retracted his hand and looked around defensively, clearly on edge, "how is this going to work?"

"You sign the Accords," Everett Ross explained with his usual gravitas, coming up behind Tony, with the other Ross glowering at him a step behind. "The newly revised Accords, that is. We take you inside, record your statement in which you will confess to your actions while in league with Steve Rogers and acknowledge the terms of your probation. A generous three months of non-active duty as a newly reinstated member of the Avengers."

Clint shifted on his feet, eyes flashing, and whispered, "Oh, is that all?" Natasha stomped on his toe discreetly and he adopted a blatantly fake smile, "I mean, yay! Probation!"

Tony smirked in spite of himself, tongue thrust into the side of his cheek in a halfhearted effort to keep the grin off his face. He hadn't realized it until now, but he'd missed Clint and his stupid sense of humor. Everett Ross looked at Clint with his lips pinched into something between and frown and a smile and shook his head slightly.

One deposition, two signed documents, and an infinity amount of political banalities later, Tony and Natasha were flying back to New York with an even more haggard Clint Barton in their company. Oh, and Secretary Ross, who needed to be back in America for an upcoming hearing and had been shoved on the soonest flight, which, as misfortune would have it, was their's.

"I wonder if they expect you to be an expert at frowning when you interview for a government job," Tony wondered with exaggerated volume, reclining in a chair next to Clint along one side of the quinjet. They were watching Ross from across the aisle as he tapped emotionlessly on a tablet.

"I can hear you, Stark," Ross grumbled without looking up.

"You can't tell, but deep down, I'm terrified," Tony returned sarcastically.

Ross glanced up, and Tony couldn't tell if it was something in his eyes or just the reflection of light from his tablet, but something made him suddenly uneasy. "You should be," Ross said darkly, but then he sneered like he was joking and went back to his work.

"Tell me about the new team," Clint said conversationally, perhaps a little forced, but still genuinely interested.

"Well there's Hope van Dyne. I've known her since she was five. Our dads were, well, calling them _business partners_ is too much of a stretch, they actually hated each other. Anyways, she's a quiet type, real piece of work. Got a haircut like the female version of Spock. Thinks she knows better than God."

Clint smiled knowingly, "So, you like her then?"

Tony grunted noncommittally, "I like her enough."

"They had a rocky start," Natasha called from the cockpit of the jet, twisting in the pilot's chair to look over her shoulder at them. "Tony was convinced that her father had planted her on the team for the sole purpose of getting close enough to kill him, so he refused to be in the same room with her without somebody else for two weeks. Then he saw her make a new pot of coffee after she finished the last of the old one and realized that she wasn't Satan incarnate."

Clint's smile grew wider, "I think I like her already. Who else? What about that spider guy from the airport in Leipzig?"

"That's Peter," Tony said, softer now, his voice low enough so it wouldn't carry to Ross over the hum of the jet engines. "He's in high school."

Clint waited expectantly for Tony to elaborate. "And?" he pressed.

Tony shrugged wildly with his hands, "And that's literally all you have to know about him other than he can stick to walls and shoot webs. He's a golden retriever puppy with pubescent mood swings."

Clint fell into silence, moving around in his seat like he couldn't get comfortable and taking deeper breaths at odd times like he was constantly on the verge of saying something, but swallowed the words every time.

Tony knew what he wanted to say, and he knew why it was hard for him to say it. So he coughed mildly and brushed a lone string of fabric from the sleeve of his suit jacket, "Rhodey's doing well. He's flying now, actually. We've been working him up to combat duty for the past month."

Clint looked miserably relieved, "Really? How - how'd you figure that out?"

Tony gave him a look, "You mean walking?"

"Yeah," Clint said, his voice subdued with more hidden emotion than Tony wanted to decipher.

"Don't you watch the news?" he asked.

"Fury's had me bouncing around the world for a month," Clint reminded him quietly, shooting a furtive glance at Ross who was now engaged in a heated argument over the phone. "I haven't been able to catch very much of the news since the hearing after Burundi."

"Stark Industries is launching a new product this winter. It's a leg brace with proprioception technology, capable of stimulating rehabilitation in partial paralysis victims. It can't cure it completely, and I'm still working on a more effective way to counter full paralysis, but for now, they'll be used as a way to stall musculoskeletal atrophy in more severe cases. We're calling it Genesis."

Clint tilted his chin in a version of a nod, "I guess that's appropriate." Then he fell into silence, discovering a renewed fascination with his combat boots and he scuffed them around under the chair, something unsaid hanging between them, reeking of unmistakable eventuality.

Since Clint had surrendered himself this morning, they had been treading on eggshells around each other; all clipped politeness and phatic communication and strained smiles. Not entirely out of contempt, but because there was something that needed to be addressed between them, but both were feebly hoping that they could ignore it and move on.

The remainder of the flight passed quickly and unextraordinarily; the only other noteworthy moment was when, after Ross disconnected from his lengthy and strenuously cryptic call, Tony teased him about being on rough ground with his girlfriend. To which Ross snapped back with a response layered with double meaning, _"Don't ask questions that you don't want to know the answer to, Stark."_

Ross always put Tony off, but there was something different about him today that made his nerves send blasts of cold fire through his body. Something dangerous.

The floor inside the quinjet grumbled and vibrated as the landing gear activated and Natasha set them down expertly on the circular pad. The docking ramp hissed open, letting in a fresh burst of fall air and afternoon sunlight. Tony stood and led Clint down the ramp and into the compound in the direction of the team's living quarters.

Natasha caught up to them on the stairs after having supervised Ross' journey through the compound and into an awaiting car which would shuttle him back to Washington. Tony didn't trust Ross as far as he could throw him, but Natasha trusted him even less.

She positioned herself at her usual spot by Tony's right shoulder, consciously marking her loyalties with him. It was incredibly reassuring, in a guilty and selfish way. Tony would be lying if he said that he hadn't been worried about how Clint's coming back to the team would affect his relationship with Natasha, which was still healing and their trust rebuilding. She and Clint were close, compromisingly so, and Tony had more than once caught himself wondering if Natasha would simply realign herself with her friend.

But her solid presence, stalwart and determined, gave him all the confidence he needed that she was here to stay.

They stopped outside a door in one of the hallways close to the solarium and Clint let himself into the room, cautiously and without much conviction. Natasha followed him in but Tony hung back by the doorway, watching mutely and with undercurrents of apprehension. He wanted this to work. He didn't want this to be a mistake.

Clint stopped in the middle of the room, taking in the simple wooden bed frame, the dresser, and the bookshelves that Tony had stocked with some of the same titles that he'd seen lying around at the Barton's farmhouse. He'd tried to incorporate the feel of Clint's home, a place he'd spent quite a bit of time in recently, into the design of his room. Homely, basic. The essentials, nothing elaborate or ornate.

At first, still wrestling with vestiges of anger, Tony had spitefully ordered Ikea crap to furnish Clint's quarters. Impersonal and cheap. _What he deserves,_ he'd thought, trying to feel justified in ordering things with impossible names and failing to convince himself that it was true. Because Clint didn't actually deserve that. He'd made a mistake, chosen the wrong side, and said something in a moment of defensive hatred. Besides, Clint had already taken the first step in repairing what had been broken when he'd decided to come back, and Tony couldn't justify taking a reciprocal step in the opposite direction. So he took a step forward, too, designing the room as if he was doing it for a friend. Because they had been friends, they'd just gotten lost somewhere along the way.

He watched Clint flash the smallest but most authentic smile he'd seen all day when he saw the dartboard hanging on the wall. "This is nice, Tony. Thank you."

Tony shrugged away his gratitude with a flick of his hand, feeling unspoken permission to step into the room, "It was nothing. Oh, and I wasn't going to say this with Ross sitting ten feet away, but I've arranged for Laura and the kids to come up and visit at the end of the week. I figured it would be a good idea to put some time in between you getting back and seeing them," Tony explained, blind to the way that the new friendliness in Clint's eyes evaporated into mist when he began talking about his family, "You know, get you settled here, let some of the heat die down."

"So," Clint said hotly, his arms coming up to cross aggressively in front of his chest, "You don't have a family of your own so you decided to cozy up with mine?"

Tony took an involuntary step back, reeling like Clint had reached out and struck him. He was back in the Raft, the full force of Clint's fear and betrayal battering against him, convinced that the only reason he hadn't been torn apart was the four inch glass and interspaced iron bars that separated them.

Clint had the decency to look horrified when the magnitude of his words finally hit him. "No, God. Tony. That - that's not what I meant. I was - Jesus," he whispered hoarsely, trailing off miserably.

Natasha stood stock still, her eyes wide and glaring at him with enraged mortification. Clint obviously knew about his parents, but Tony didn't believe that he'd be cold enough to use them as a way to guilt trip him out of his new closeness with Laura and the kids. But that wasn't exactly comforting.

Nobody said anything for a long time, allowing a poisonous silence to take over. Clint finally stumbled back until he was sitting hunched over on the bed, putting his hands in his hair and breathing deeply, shoulders tense. "What happened to us?" he wondered brokenly.

"We kept secrets," Tony answered automatically, thinking of all of the things that had lead to this moment: the three of them standing in a room filled with so much uncertainty and hurt, speaking words that could kill.

Natasha looked at him with concern and took a faltering step in his direction. Tony raised a hand to stop her and backed out of the room. He didn't want to talk.

"I'm sorry, Tony," Clint said, looking up and finding him with red eyes. "Please. I can't do this anymore. I'm sorry."

Tony gave him a tired smile, one side of his mouth twitching upwards, "Yeah, me too."

He left Clint and Natasha together and tried not to run down the hall, his heart pounding in his chest and light searing in his eyes, trailing a hand on the wall next to him as he walked to anchor himself to something real. He ghosted past the kitchen where Hope was sitting at a counter twirling a spoon in her tea and watching Vision as he performed Attempt #27 in replicating Laura Barton's cookie recipe. Rhodey might've said something to him from the couch, but Tony couldn't remember and he continued on without stopping, walking down the observation balcony above the sim room and crossing the skywalk into the managerial side of the compound.

He wanted to sit at a desk, send an email to Julia about legal strings that needed tying so Clint's deal had no chance of unravelling down the line, and maybe call Pepper about the beginning stages of product testing for Genesis. A little normality would be good for him.

Unfortunately, Thaddeus Ross had no intention of letting him get that far.

He was waiting for him inside his office, playing with an intricate model of the SR-71 Blackbird that Tony kept on his desk. Tony froze on the spot when he saw him, mentally and emotionally unprepared to have this conversation. He tried to sneak back out of the office, but Ross saw him in the reflection of the windows and turned, "Stark, about time. I need to talk to you."

Tony forced the sound of his mother gasping for air as she died out of his mind, slipping into a convincing projection of confidence and okay-ness _._ "Ross, I thought Natasha saw you out."

"She did," Ross said, flipping the model once more in his hand and returning it back to Tony's desk. "I came back."

"Yeah, I can see that," Tony noted, striding around Ross to stand behind his desk. He didn't sit down. "Why?"

Ross paced with his hands comfortably in his pockets, eyes never straying from Tony's face and his nerves screamed at him that this was wrong. "That was convenient, you working to clear Clint Barton for reinstatement just in time for him to come back."

Tony growled, "Are you accusing me of something?"

"I'm just saying that it was convenient," Ross said gruffly. Then he swept on, sitting stiffly on the couch. Tony didn't sit. Ross would have to look up at him to talk. "I need your help."

Tony's internal alarms were blaring now. He wanted something. And people who wanted something were dangerous. "With what?"

Ross leaned forward on the couch to reach for Tony's collection of scotch and tumblers that were organized neatly in a glass tray on the coffee table. "Your father," he started, removing the crystal stopper of one bottle and drawing it under his nose before grimacing and putting it back. "He had something of interest to me. I want it, and I think you can get it for me."

"My father had a lot of interesting things," Tony countered irritably, watching Ross with the blood boiling in his veins. He wasn't going to help, of course he wasn't, but he wanted to know what was so important to Ross that had him acting so strangely. "You have to be more specific."

Ross uncorked a different bottle and seemed satisfied, pouring himself a drink while maintaining perfect eye contact with Tony. "Think, Captain America. Bucky Barnes."

Tony understood and the heat in his blood turned instantly to ice. "Supersoldiers," he finished. Then he chuckled humorlessly, "You've got to find a new obsession, sir. Stamp collecting, quilting, baking. Vision could teach you how to make one mean muffin, you know, with that delicious strudel stuff on - "

"Cut the crap, Stark," Ross broke in domineeringly, rising to his feet with his tumbler in hand. "I have sources that tell me that Howard had successfully recreated the super soldier serum before his death. I want it."

The sirens in his head were deafening now. "That doesn't sound very legal," Tony ventured elusively, raising his eyebrows.

Ross took a relaxed sip from his tumbler, and Tony reminded himself to melt the entire glassware set to slag later, "It won't matter whether or not it was legal when we get what we want."

"Well, what makes you think that I'll give it to you?" Tony squinted at him, genuinely confused. There was something bigger here, something that Ross had tucked away in his box of tricks. Something to ensure that he'd get what he came for.

"Let's just say that if I don't have your cooperation within the next," he drew out the word as he pulled back the sleeve of his suit to consider his wristwatch, "72 hours, there'll be consequences. You have that long to give me your decision," Ross leered at him and slammed back the rest of his drink, setting the empty glass back on the table. "I hope it's the right one."

Tony watched him march out, confident as all hell, and disappear down the hallway. He stayed on his feet for minutes after Ross left, his mind moving at the speed of light and churning out numbers and theories. Screaming heat. Finally, when he was sure that Ross wasn't coming back, he fell into the chair behind his desk, exhausted. "Did you get all that, Fri?"

"Every word, Boss," FRIDAY answered from the ceiling, calmly and familiar.

Tony sighed, reaching for his model of the SR-71 and sliding it across the surface of his desk until it was back in its proper place, "Good."

"Should I share the file with your contacts at the Department of Justice?" she asked helpfully.

Tony twined his fingers together and rocked back in his chair, bouncing softly and looking at spot he had seen Ross' back vanish, "Not yet. Let's sit on it for a while. I want to see what he does."

FRIDAY paused briefly and when she spoke again, she sounded worried. "Voice stress analysis of the recording taken of Secretary Ross suggest that his threat is real, Boss."

Tony bobbed his head from side to side, weighing the probabilities. "Mutually assured destruction, FRIDAY," he pointed out finally. "He knows that he can't hurt me without hurting himself."

"Whatever you say, Boss," FRIDAY agreed reluctantly.

Tony waved his hand underneath the monitor on his desk and the computer screen blinked to life, an electronic keyboard glowing on the glass of the desk. He stretched his fingers, tried to quiet his mind, and did something normal. He sent his email to Julia, checked the stocks, and requested the preliminary reports on the Genesis product testing from the Stark International executive server. But the words bled together on the screen and the light wavered as his mind wandered elsewhere. By the time he dragged himself back from subconsciousness, he was halfway through an intense discussion with Peter Park about the mass manufacturable potential of spider silk for real world applications.

"I mean," Peter gushed, sprawled on the couch with his neck resting against the top of the cushions and his hands gesturing excitedly to the ceiling, "think about it. Something _stronger_ than kevlar but as thin as a silk shirt."

Tony considered him, squinting, "How long you been here?"

Peter lifted his head from the couch and jabbed his thumb at the entrance of Tony's office, "Happy dropped me off after school." He looked closer at him, "You okay, Mr. Stark?"

"Fantastic," Tony hummed.

Just then a high-status report came through, a deep red alert banner overriding the file on Tony's screen and a serious tone rang obtrusively throughout the compound. Peter jumped, "What was that?"

"That," Tony said, hands flying over the keyboard, "was the call to assemble."

"Woah," Peter spluttered, flying up from the couch and leaping through the air over Tony's desk to land at his shoulder, "Assemble like _Avengers_ assemble?"

Tony grinned up at him, "Is there any other assemble that matters?"

Peter's eyes went wide, trying to read the screen over Tony's back, "What for?"

"Agents from an extremist group, believed to be a derivative of Hydra, have been wreaking havoc in Oslo. We've just learned that they've planted bombs with an unknown payload throughout the city. The Norwegian government has requested help, the UN is calling us in," FRIDAY's disembodied voice informed them. "Vision, Natasha, Rhodey, and Hope are all en route to the quinjet. Waiting on you, Boss."

"Take me with you," Peter demanded immediately.

"Yeah, no," Tony smiled without sympathy and Peter frowned, "I'm not bringing you to Norway on a school night."

"It'll be fine," Peter tried, tripping over his feet in his hurry to follow Tony out of his office, his backpack swinging from his shoulder. "Come on, Mr. Stark! I've been training with the team for a month. I can do this!"

"You have a calculus unit final tomorrow," Tony reminded him coyly, leaving Peter standing behind him with the mask of his suit in hand. "Study hard!"

 **XxX**

Peter did not study. Peter did not listen.

Peter _hung to the bottom of a jet turbine_ as they shot across the Atlantic Ocean to Norway.

Peter could not wipe the shit-eating grin off his face when Tony found him waiting for them outside when the docking ramp lowered, unfazed by Tony's screaming and threatening to turn this jet right around and take him back home.

"How'd you even get FRIDAY to lie to me?" Tony seethed, staring Peter down through the suit. "I had her run an external scan when we left the compound. She didn't say anything about a stow away spider."

"Oh," Peter started proudly, "well I exploited one of her subroutines. The 'Help the Kid' one. Thanks for that by the way."

Hope snickered behind Tony and busied herself with running a final check on her suit when Tony swiveled to glare at her hard. She shrugged, smirking to Natasha who was smiling softly next to her, who looked immensely pleased to finally be allowed on a mission.

"FRIDAY?" Tony demanded angrily.

"Peter's instructions did not undermine any of your orders, or explicitly contradict my programming. Technically, I fulfilled my function as your AI," FRIDAY explained, and if she could sound smug, she did.

"Don't give me technicalities," Tony rebuked futilely, grudgingly accepting the fact that Peter was here and that he wasn't going anywhere.

"You love technicalities, Boss."

"Fine," Tony groaned, turning dramatically to face the rest of the team and rolling his eyes when he saw Peter pump his fists triumphantly and give Rhodey a high five. "Listen up, we're here to assist the Norwegians. There's a lot riding on this one, and not just politically. We need a win and we need to do it together. There's a lot of new blood here, and we need to get some traction. Hope, stop glaring at me, I'm trying to be sincere."

 **XxX**

It wasn't anybody's fault, it just went _wrong._

The bombs detonated before expected and the Hydra offshoot agents fled from the streets like rats. Tony sent Peter on reconnaissance after them while he, Rhodey, Vision, Natasha, and Hope managed damage control with the Oslo emergency responders. The bombs didn't explode into fire and shrapnel, but millions of nanites. It only took a few minutes for them to assemble into a massive, terrifying, nanotechnological monstrosity.

"FRIDAY!" Tony barked, regrouping at the end of a street with the rest of the team to watch the thing form.

"An intercepted outgoing transmission from the enemy base called it Technovore," FRIDAY explained hurriedly. "Composed entirely of nanobots, capable of disassembling itself into any shape or form, including a stream of single nanites which would enable it to fit into extremely small places. Based on my scans, each nanite appears to contain an entire digital consciousness."

"So it can rebuild itself from a single nanite," Tony summarized, ignoring the fearful buzz of Norwegian military and police personnel around him until it escalated in volume and urgency when the shimmering black mass reorganized itself into a centipede like monster and scampered away, towering over cars and civilians as they ran for cover. "Where's it going?"

"Calculating," FRIDAY said and Tony took to the air, Vision and Rhodey at his feet. They followed it at a distance, watching it do nothing. It wasn't hurting anybody and it wasn't attacking. Yet. "Boss, it's headed for the NEXUS."

Tony swore violently. "I know what it is," he said, keying up an open comm channel with the team. "It's a technological parasite. We can't let it get to the NEXUS, it'll suck up every byte of data. Names, locations, your last credit card purchase, international security secrets. Everything. New objective, stop it. This isn't one of those cheap knock-off Hydra divisions that Fury was talking about," Tony ventured to FRIDAY.

"You think?" she retorted and shifted the suit into combat mode.

It all went to shit after they engaged.

It didn't take Technovore very long to abandon its original target and lock onto a new one: arc reactor energy signatures. It went after Tony and Rhodey mercilessly, thick tendrils of nanites lashing out like deadly whips and hurling things through the air as they dodged and weaved in the sky. Rhodey was grounded, after a moment of true, heart-stopping terror when Technovore managed to land a blow to the chest piece of the War Machine armor, disabling the arc reactor. The suit fell through the sky for one terrible second before the emergency release finally activated and Rhodey and the parachute were ejected safely from the armor.

Technovore converged on Rhodey's empty armor and assimilated the suit's full technological and physical capabilities. Tony's repulsors became completely useless against it. Hope tried to use her own particle blasts, but the energy makeups of her rays and Tony's were too similar to have much of an effect and Technovore quickly adapted to her attack, too.

Vision's mind stone was the only thing that seemed to make a dent, and even that didn't work well enough to get them out on top. But it did get them time. The energy pulse would burn through the nanobots and Technovore would wail, a horrible, screeching whine that sounded like a faulty microphone and scissors on guitar string. It would withdraw and protect itself from a distance, waiting for the nanites to reassemble and heal itself. Then it would be back, angrier and smarter.

The only thing they had going for them was Peter, who had somehow managed to trail one of the agents back to their base in an underground, forgotten subway line. Natasha was providing his backup.

At some point, FRIDAY broke through the haze of the battle as she spoke into his ear on their private line. "Boss," she said with quiet intensity. "To your right, down that alley."

Tony risked a glance and FRIDAY enhanced his visuals. He almost fell out of the sky when he recognized the two people who were crouched in the darkness, watching him.

Steve and Sam.

"What the hell are they doing here?" Tony choked out, the fight fading to the background. He didn't know what to do. He'd thought about this; about meeting them eventually. He'd thought about being an ass and hauling them back to the UN and he'd thought about doing something surprisingly altruistic, like letting them go without a fight. But now, staring at Steve and seeing the recognition in his eyes, the fear, the desperate need to help but also incredible regret because he _couldn't,_ Tony couldn't make himself do anything except stare.

Tony felt FRIDAY's voice vibrating in his head, trying to call him back, but he couldn't look away. By the time he heard her warning, it was too late, and he found himself flipping uncontrollably through the air and colliding with unforgiving brick, crashing through the wall of an apartment building and rolling for a few feet before scraping to a halt. His head collided roughly with the inside of his helmet and he recognized the all too familiar warmth of blood trickle down the side of his face. _"What the hell?"_ he moaned, rolling to his knees as bricks and plaster fell from the ceiling. "Where am I hit?"

"Weapons systems offline," FRIDAY relayed quickly. "All other systems functional."

Tony shook his head, trying to clear it, but the movement just made his vision double and he gasped, breathing against the nausea. Concussion then. "Peter?" he called hopefully over the comms, "Please tell me you have something."

"Uh," Peter muttered, unsure. "Maybe. I'm at their control center, I think. Everybody completely cleared out, but they left all their tech. They saw you guys coming and set that thing on you to give them time to get away."

Tony pushed himself to his feet and fired his repulsors and shot out of the hole he'd just created in the side of somebody's kitchen wall. "Find a way to shut it down, Parker. We can't last much longer against this thing. It's adaptive. We can't fight it."

"Even Vision's attack isn't slowing it down anymore," Hope called, out of breath and shaken. "We need to do something now, kid."

"Okay, okay, okay," Peter stuttered, panicked. "We could try to get to it from the inside."

"It's not a machine," Rhodey reminded him, patched back into the team's channel using a communicator donated to him by the Norwegian military. "It's like an organism. There's not mechanics in there. You won't be able to just get in a hijack the controls, because there aren't any controls."

"No," Peter agreed, sounding overwhelmed. Then he was silent. "But there is programming. Mr. Stark, you said this thing can integrate other systems right?"

"That's what I said," Tony confirmed, barrel rolling to the side as Technovore flung a bus at him from down the street. It sailed past him, missing by an inch, and crumpled into the pavement, sparks flying and metal screaming. Tony looped back around and skimmed close to the ground, snatching a spear shaped strip of metal from the wreckage.

"So let's feed it something that'll make it sick," Peter suggested, his voice gaining some confidence back.

"A self-corrupting program could shut it down," Vision affirmed collectedly. He could be pummeled into glitter and he would still sound like he was talking about the weather.

"What are you going to put it in? We need Technovore to assimilate it, right?" Hope asked, and Tony waved the scrap sheet of metal at her as he streaked overhead. She understood immediately and as Tony launched the javelin like object through the air, she shot one of her stingers to intersect with its course. The metal and the stinger collided and electricity consumed the sheet just as it sunk into Technovore's chest. Arcs of lightning ripped through the swarm of nanobots and it wailed, falling back and cowering into itself. That would buy them a few minutes.

Tony landed next to Hope, hard, his vision swimming unsteadily as the electronic scream sliced through his head. "Peter, write the program and send it to FRIDAY. I'll put it in the suit and let Technovore have it. Keep it simple."

"Mutually assured destruction," Peter added enthusiastically. "It'll take the suit out, but then the suit'll take him out. Cool!"

Hope looked sideways at Tony and said nothing, but he saw newfound respect in her eyes.

"Okay, good plan," Natasha said, "Except how do you plan on getting out of there, Tony? Something tells me that you won't want to be in the suit when that thing starts eating it."

"I'll figure it out," Tony deflected easily, not really thinking about the problem she brought up, but a more important one. They could shut Technovore down, but there would be millions and millions of advanced nanobots left over and some of them were bound to fall through the cracks during cleanup. They couldn't afford to let even a single nanite get away, because each one carried an entire viral personality. Technovore could just be reborn if one of those nanites made it back into the wrong hands. It wasn't enough to shut it down, they needed to destroy it. "FRIDAY, when you get that program from Peter I need you to insert a malicious code. There needs to be fire and brimstone when this goes down," Tony ordered his AI over their private channel.

"Yes, Boss."

Technovore moved in front of them, the surface of it heaving as nanobots proliferated to fill empty spaces. It turned back towards them and roared, it's head like a jagged toothed demon, it's red eyes glowing like angry coals. Slender curls of electricity sparked over its body and it expanded to its full height, bearing down on them.

"Shit!" Hope spat eloquently, the delicate wings of her suit lifting her into the air next to Tony as they tried to gain some height advantage over it.

"Parker!" Tony snapped urgently over the comms, narrowly avoiding the first attack, a stream of nannies whipping past his face, humming with an electric current. "Where are you at with that virus?"

"Almost there, almost there," Peter muttered distractedly.

Tony's reply was cut off as Technovore wrapped a tentacle around another bus and launched it at them. They dove underneath it, watching as it flipped in the space above their heads. It served as a good distraction, because they were entirely unprepared for the instantaneous attack that followed. One moment, he and Hope were side by side in the air, and the next he was getting battered around inside the suit as he crashed to the ground, his HUD going fuzzy with the impact. He didn't know when he finally stopped moving because the entire world was spinning and his head felt like somebody had taken an icepick to his brain. FRIDAY was talking to him but he couldn't hear her, just the bells in his ears.

He was splayed on the broken concrete by that alleyway again, the one where he'd seen Steve and Sam, and he wondered dimly if they were still watching. He couldn't help but think that if Steve were here, he'd know what to do. The thought motivated him to his feet and he fired the repulsors, which sputtered intermittently and held him unevenly in the air. Steve wasn't here, not in a way that mattered. But Tony was, and he'd have to be enough.

He saw Hope lying motionless across the street, covered in dust and her suit sparking, and he shot over to her, panic clogging his throat. He covered the short distance in an instant and dropped to her side, crouching over her to shake her shoulder, "Hope." He shook harder, "Hope! Wake up, I need you. That thing's coming back. Come on, Princess!"

Hope groaned and rolled sluggishly onto her back, weakly shoving his hand off her and glaring the best she could with glazed over eyes, "Fuck. You," she coughed, straining to get herself off the ground.

Tony offered one of his armored hands, smiling at her with fevered relief, and she let him pull her to her feet. They stood there together and watched as Vision darted around Technovore, doing as much damage as a fly, Hope's hand still gripping his gauntlet like it was the only thing keeping her upright.

"Done!" Peter shouted suddenly in Tony's ear and he winced, which only made his head hurt more. "I finished it! It's done. Mr. Stark, I'm sending FRIDAY the program now."

"Good work, kid," Tony breathed, his chest aching. Energy poured into his body now that there was something he knew he could do that would work, not just being swatted out of the sky by a technologically adaptable nanodroid with a bad attitude. "FRIDAY, you know what to do."

Hope released his arm and nodded at him, blood oozing from a cut above her eyebrow, "Make sure you get out of there before it eats you. I'd hate to see you become that thing's dinner."

Tony took off, blazing down the street back towards Technovore, buildings blurring past him on both sides. "Fri, I want you out of here before it takes over the armor," Tony ordered, falling out of flight into a controlled run until he slowed to a stop, standing in the center of the street. "I don't want it to get you, too."

"Understood," FRIDAY said. "Good luck, Boss." And then she was gone, leaving silence where her warm objectivity used to be. Tony didn't worry about what he was going to do if the manual release didn't work, and he most certainly didn't worry about how he was going to put enough distance between him and Technovore before it blew up (courtesy of friday's additions to peter's virus). He was seeing two of everything at this point, so he probably wouldn't make it that far running. Tony sighed heavily. This was probably going to hurt. No scratch that. He was probably going to die.

"Hey!" Tony shouted, the sound of his own voice sending fresh waves of pain crashing through him. He blasted his repulsors at Technovore and they were absorbed harmlessly, but they succeeded in annoying it enough to switch its attention from Vision to Tony. It's entire body turned towards him and it screeched, eyes smoldering with cold red. Yeah, he was probably going to die.

A tendril lashed out a wrapped itself around Tony's armor and the HUD blared and flashed frantically, telling him about systems malfunctions and armor breaches that didn't really matter because the suit was going down anyways. Technovore's eyes seemed to widen eagerly when it realized that it had an entire goldmine of untouched data literally in its grasp and it slithered closer sending out more cables of nanites to latch onto the suit. Tony's heart leaped painfully in his chest and his brain splintered as the shrieking grew louder around him. He hit the manual override button to release the armor.

And nothing happened.

Tony's immediate reaction was to be annoyed, running through all the numbers and schematics in his head, trying to figure out how he could fix this particular snag later. The next thing he did, was realize that there probably wouldn't be a later. And immediately after that, he completely erased the word 'probably' from his mind because this was bad and he was _definitely_ going to die.

After that, he pounded desperately on the little catch on the inside of his wrist, cursing methodically. Eventually, something sparked and burst underneath Tony's fingers and the shock traveled up through his arm, roasting what was left of his brain. There was too much stress on the system, and things started malfunctioning quickly after that. Flight capabilities, life support, emergency power reserves, and finally the HUD, flickering spasmodically before it died completely. With it went all the voices in his head, which he realized had actually been his team trying to talk to him through the chaos, and then it was just silent. But not silent as in soundless. The noise around him was deafening, metal creaking and moaning and Technovore _laughing_ in its scaly, digitalized whine and Tony heard it all - he could _feel_ it. It was a kind of silent that came when somebody was scared. He was trapped in his suit, listening to it die, and he finally let himself be scared.

He wondered if this was how his mother had felt, unable to move but watch as death came for her, fighting it with everything she had. He wondered if she had been scared. Or if she had stared it down bravely, refusing to give it the satisfaction of watching her give in.

There was a click and a thin gust of wind on his shoulder and then Tony was falling through the back of his suit onto the street, looking up at his armor still wrapped up in ropes of nanites. Technovore drove a spike through the arc reactor, shattering it and tearing through the chest plate and into the suit where he'd been trapped seconds before. Sparks showered over Tony and he scrambled away on his hands, throwing up an arm to protect his face, "Holy shit!"

Hope popped into existence next to him, bending down to grab his elbow and hoist him to his feet, grinning fiercely, "Need some help, Princess?"

Tony squinted at her face, blurring in and out of focus, "Hope?"

"Yep," she said, dragging him away by his arm, his feet stumbling for traction underneath him. "Saved your life. I'll explain later. Let's get out of here."

Technovore squealed behind them and Tony turned his head over his shoulder to look. It's entire body pulsed as it absorbed the suit's technology. "No time. It's going to blow up," he told her, slipping his wrist out of her grip, "Run."

They sprinted away and Tony did pretty well for the first couple of steps until his scrambled brain told him the ground wasn't where it actually was and he tripped into a telephone pole, which probably would've been really hilarious if they weren't about to die. Hope skidded to a stop and reached for him, her eyes widening when she got a clear view of the thing behind them. It wailed, and the noise shredded through the air, shattering the windows of nearby buildings and Hope screamed curling into herself with her hands clapped over her ears.

Tony heard a different noise though; a low rumble and the district hum of an electricity surge. He gripped Hope and pulled her behind the closest car just as the explosion turned the air solid. It wasn't huge or full of fire, it was more localized and dense - hard and devastating, as millions of nanobots ruptured simultaneously.

The car saved their lives, protecting them from the full force of the detonation which would've crushed them instantly. Instead, they were blasted off their feet and tumbled through the air. All the breath was punched out of Tony's lungs when he landed on the concrete a dozen feet away. His head hit the ground for probably the tenth time in two hours and the world was covered by curtain of impenetrable black.

He didn't know how long he laid there, trying to suck in dusty air through the tightness in his chest and riding out waves of pain as he choked on it. He fought the darkness away, but it stayed at the edges of his vision, waiting for him to let his guard down. He twitched his hand and felt Hope next to him, but he couldn't turn his head to look at her, so he kept the back of his hand pressed against her leg so he wouldn't lose her. He stared at the sky, darkening and full of possibilities. He blinked and each time became harder for him to open his eyes again until he just didn't anymore.

And then there was a distant buzzing in his ears, a desperate vibration in his head that made him wrench his eyes open again. Somebody was kneeling above him. He could barely make out the outline of a head and he blinked again, trying to see something except shadows. Somebody was trying to talk to him, a hand on his chest, but that was a pretty much hopeless. Tony couldn't hear anything, so he focused on seeing. He blinked and worked the muscles in his eyes, lightning strikes of agony shooting through his brain at even the slightest movements until finally the figure above him snapped into painful clarity.

 _Steve,_ Tony thought hazily, confused. He felt Steve's heavy hand on his chest and he _remembered_ , jerking away from him instinctively, driven by an animal response to get away.

 _Then_ he passed out.

 **XxX**

 **I already have a plan for the next chapter, and I'm working on writing it. So it will, optimistically, be up within the next 1-2 weeks.**

 **Huge thank you to all of the reviews and favorites and follows. They make me happy :)**

 **mr-stank**


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